'I don't need a new Chevvy this year,' said her brother.
For years, Bethel was to be at a disadvantage when young actresses explained that they had the most interesting excuses for every lapse, because their parents and brothers had been so unimaginative, unsympathetic and generally so American.
As she went to bed, she exulted that she was a real employed actress now; that in just a month she would be at the Point Grampion school. But there was something irascible lurking behind the bland joy, and she dared to drag it out:
'I did overdo Nora. It wasn't good enough. I wasn't good enough!'
VI
All those two days at home, June 15th and 16th, 1938, before she went off to the summer theatre at Grampion, she earnestly enacted the role of a girl saying good-bye to childhood and to every loved spot that her infancy knew: the cement garage, the pergola on which the Concord grapevines were always rather dry, the basement playroom with the tracks of the electric railroad which she had inherited from Ben.
She also devoted herself to sound self-examination--she tried to.
She felt, and quite guiltily, that she ought to be devoting herself to worrying about the dispossessed Jews in Germany and Poland, the share croppers in Oklahoma; and, if not doing anything about them--for obviously she never would do anything about them--at least showing herself a right-thinking liberal by hourly agonizing, 'Oh, isn't there something I can do?' But she had to admit that what she wanted was much simpler: she just wanted to act.
She felt guilty because none of her life had been conspicuously devoted to 'doing things for other people'. That was Professor Miss Bickling's war cry and nursery ditty: 'The greatest joy and privilege in life is doing things for other people.' But Bethel found that she coveted dancing lessons, fencing lessons, French lessons, piano and voice and make-up, for herself.
'Well then, I guess I'm just that kind of a selfish pig,' she lamented.
She was equally dissatisfied with her examination of the status, to date, of the Heart of Bethel Merriday. She wasn't quite sure that she had one.
Certainly, if the test was, as she often read, lying awake longing for the smiles and caresses of some particular young man, she had no heart, as yet. She liked the laughter of the young men and their hard handshakes, but she wanted to jeer when she heard Alva Prindle or Gale Amory yearn that some curly-headed, pipe-flourishing young male was 'just wonderful'.
Alva had given up her claim to Hollywood. Already a little stringy at twenty-three, she was devoted to the hope that one A. Alexander Brown, a fat insurance agent with the optimism characteristic of all insurance agents, would marry her and provide a mink coat and a set of etched cocktail glasses. Not toward Alva, not toward her father and mother and brother, did Bethel feel guilty, but toward that shaggy house dog, Charley Hatch, who had been compelled by family deficits to give up his dreams of osteopathy for a job in the sales department of the Flamolio Percolator Corporation.
'You don't think maybe you'd rather marry Charley, he'll be making thirty-five dollars a week pretty soon, instead of going off and taking such an awful chance on the stage, do you?' her father had said.
'No!' said Bethel.
'Well,' said her father.
On her last night in Sladesbury, Charley came calling, and they sat on the porch.
Americans making love have always sat on porches, except for those who were too poor or too rich. In the house was electricity; Mr. Merriday was reading about the tear-gas bombing of strikers in the aeroplane industry, and Ben drawing television diagrams; but Bethel and Charley sat on a porch in New England and, despite all announcements that the whole world has changed since 1920, no one could have told them from their grandparents.
'Look, Bet, while we got the chance to be alone together--'
'You must drive down to Grampion this summer. I'll bet it'll be awfully cool on the shore.'
'I sure will, but look--'
'I hope there won't be a lot of mosquitoes.'
'I guess there won't be, but--'
'Isn't it funny how you can be awfully earnest and excited about something like acting, and then some silly little thing like mosquitoes will throw you right off!'
'Bet! I want to talk seriously--'
'Please don't.'
'You know how doggone fond I am of you.'
'Yes, I think I do, but--Oh, Charley, don't make me feel guilty. Maybe I'm the bloodless kind of girl that can't ever devote herself to any man. But I've got to go on. Honestly, please believe me, I do envy the girls that can settle down to a nice little home, but for me--prob'ly I'm crazy--it doesn't seem good enough.'
'You'll never find folks that you can depend on like you can on your home folks. In the world outside, they'll use you and then throw you away like a worn glove.'
She studied Charley. His soft hair was babyish and pathetic, yet his large, solid head seemed fatherly and protective. Was she a fool to leave this eternal kindness?
She sprang up. She cried 'No, no, no, no!' and fled into the house.
None of them could drive her down to Grampion that day--Friday, June 17th--and she went by train, which was, for one of the Modern Merridays, like travelling by oxcart.
She was overwhelmed into complete guilt by Charley's farewell present: a make-up box.
It was the most beautiful, most elaborate make-up box, with every cosmetic she had ever heard of: two kinds of rouge, evening and daytime lipstick, skin freshener, powder, mascara, nail polish in two shades, 'Dawn Delight' and 'Faint Memory', 'nourishing cream' and the humble cold cream.
She cried over it. Not for three weeks did she discover that the only things that were of the smallest use to her were the cold cream and the empty tin box.
VII
Grampion centre was a picture-book village. Red-fronted chain stores and crimson gasoline pumps had enterprisingly tried to improve its quiet quality out of existence, but Grampion was all gambrel roofs and elm trees and white steeples and white cottages with small-paned windows, and the quickening smell of salt marshes.
It was Bethel's new-found-land, and she was another pioneer of the American tradition.
The only conveyance at the station was a sedan, at least ten years old. The driver, a young man with a yellow sweater and a blue denim shirt, thrilled her by clucking (and not laughing at her, either), 'You one of the actresses, miss? Jump in. You'll have a good time this summer.'
They drove through marshes, grey-green and still, crossed a tidal creek, and came to a mile-long bay, with sun-clipped waves. Twoscore sailboats were at anchor. On one of them, three handsome burnt youngsters, in white ducks, white jerseys and white boating hats, were getting up sail, and they waved at her hopefully. Then the sedan skirted a private estate with bayberry hedges and came abruptly into the Nutmeg Theatre grounds, which occupied a quarter of the square-shaped Point Grampion and had Long Island Sound to south and westward.
Born in the hill-circled city, going to a college on the Housatonic River, Bethel little knew the sea. She looked across the Sound some ten or twelve miles to the blurred shore of Long Island, near Greenport. Fishing schooners were slanting northward, the lofty sail of a yacht leaned perilously, and through the middle distance slipped a freighter from foreign lands. The flickering stretch of the Sound was to her bluer and more fluid and ever-changing than the blue sky above her own hills. She felt superstitiously glad. The Sound was a tributary of open ocean, and she was a tributary of the great theatre. Actresses, she assured herself, if God is good to them, come down at last to the sea and to a ship which will bear them to the lights and cheering in far-off lands.