Bethel Merriday

They all begged her not to take the monster's attentions seriously.

She told them that she didn't intend to take them at all--only Zed wasn't really a monster--not really--just a 'fresh kid'--couldn't be over twenty-two--just a baby--

'In sin and impertinence, he's ninety-two,' groaned Marian Croy. 'His heart is black with vice. He thinks he can act! I know he was the prize scholar in a progressive school, and got the works of John Dewey bound in ooze calf for graduation.'

'That's just what I was going to say!' said Toni.

'Yes! So was I!' said Iris.

'Were you, darlings?' said Marian.

As all of the apprentices had appeared in Stage Door, Roscoe made only four of the more docile among them miss the party and work all of Saturday night changing the sets. He even hired two men to work with them; Doc Keezer alleged that this must have cost Roscoe all of ten dollars, almost the only money that he had been ever known to pay in wages without compulsion.

Before the Stage Door set came down, Bethel went on to stare at it with more nostalgic love than she had ever given her wide-porched home in Sladesbury.

On a stage twenty-one feet wide between the proscenic pillars, Cynthia had magicked a forty-foot apartment. That was Bethel's real home, that canvas-walled, canvas-ceilinged, littered den, with its fourth wall made of air: the handsome stairway out in the hall, the fireplace with white wooden columns like a small-sized edition of a national bank, the huddle of couch and piano, the handsome double doors that led to a festive dining-room, off-stage left, where she had eaten so many meals with her companions of the Footlights Club.

She murmured to Doc Keezer--now changed from a frail country doctor back to a short, grizzled, somehow unidentifiable trouper. 'Oh, Doc, won't you miss this set? Don't you think it's terrible it has to come down after only one week?'

Doc Keezer looked startled. He said mildly, 'Set? Don't know's I noticed it much. Any set's all right, if you can get on it without stooping through the doors and barking your shins, but otherwise, they all seem alike, after thirty-five years of it--I started at fifteen--my father and mother were in burlyque. No, dear, I don't think I'll miss it!'

She heard the bumptious invader, Zed Wintergeist, just off-stage, greeting Andy Deacon.

'H're you, Andy? Remember me?'

'Why--oh, of course! Zed! See the show to-night?'

'Yes. Ran up from the Dory. I'm doing time there this summer.'

'How did you like us?'

'Oh--well--you know. Can't expect much from stock.'

'I see.'

'Look, Andy, what you going to do this fall? If I had your money--and your patience--yes, and talent, too--I'd produce something experimental.'

'Maybe I will, Zed. Look me up in the fall--if you're interested.' But Andy did not sound too cordial.

'You bet your life I'm interested! I'll look you up. Say, uh, understand your gang is having a spirited little gathering this evening.'

'Yes. In the dorm. Come along, will you? And can I put you up to-night? Rain's pretty bad.'

'Yes to both. See you later.'

She stood with Andy at the stage door, awaiting a halt in the rain before they should scurry over to the dormitory.

'I heard you talking to that Wintergeist boy, Andy. Is he a good actor?'

'Excellent. I'm not sure but that Zed'll turn out to be another Burgess Meredith or Van Heflin or Dean Jagger.'

'He seems so bumptious.'

'Young people of talent often are. I haven't had the chance to get much acquainted with you yet, my dear--not my fault, I assure you!--but I haven't a doubt that you're just as cocksure of yourself--'

'Oh, I am not!'

'--only you have more ladylike manners. You wouldn't want Zed to be ladylike, would you?'

'Who is he?'

'Nobody--yet. He's conceited and destructive. He'd be perfectly capable of telling Guthrie McClintic or Tony Miner that their direction is rotten. But he's honest, and he's got ideas, and he doesn't want to be an elegant connoisseur--like me!'

'Oh, you're not!'

'I played with him on tour in that English mystery melodrama, The Light Goes Out. He was the English captain who'd murdered the Rector of Mittyford, and he made even that phony part believable. You could almost smell the mess port and the machine-gun grease. And I, my dear Beth, will have you understand that I was a chief inspector of Scotland Yard--chief inspector, not a plain one!--and I was so realistic that in Pittsburgh, Harold Cohen wrote that I made him homesick for the Camden, New Jersey, police station . . . Yes. I'm a better organizer than Zed; I'm more punctual and I can keep expense accounts more accurately; but I'll never be able to act as well,' said the honest Andy.

'You just mean you'll never be able to act as noisily.'

The great man was looking grateful.

'Thank you, my public! Zed's a biological and biographical sport. I'm afraid I'm too standardized. He's one half Virginia gentry, and a quarter German and a quarter Irish, I suppose with some good Jewish blood for flavour. I suspect his real Christian name of being Ezekiel. He's about twenty-three, I guess. He came from a Montana ranch to Broadway via a country newspaper in Minnesota and a medicine show and a year in Dartmouth College and a few months in the New York School for Design and six months playing Shakespeare in the Old Vic in London. God knows how he got into any of 'em, but it's easy to see how he got out of all of 'em. Well, Iris, darling--oh, I'm sorry! Bethel darling, I mean!--let's forgive him. Look! Rain's let up. Let's scoot.'

Somebody--Bethel suspected Andy--had for the party provided cold chicken, lobster salad, English sweet biscuits and champagne--oh, a very little champagne, of a very little domestic brand, but it was the first Bethel had ever tasted, and on tasting it she decided that it wasn't half as good as cider. Nothing so obvious as alcohol or nicotine would be the downfall of Bethel Merriday.

At the party they played The Game, inevitably, and Maggie Sample astounded them by coming to life and riotously enacting the advertising slogan, 'A skin you love to touch'.

Zed Wintergeist went around being superior to these puerilities. In a corner he muttered again to Bethel that she really hadn't been bad--that she might have a chance to become a real actress, if she worked like a slave.

It was the warmest attention she had ever had from a fellow priestling. 'They say my danger is overplaying,' she confided.

'Nonsense! Bunch of amateurs! Overacting did used to be the tradition. Then the Provincetown Players and the Theatre Guild came along and made acting more natural. Now we're going too far, underplaying too much. Can't you see from the words themselves that underplaying must be just as bad as overplaying. I'd rather be a scenery chewer than play so far down that it ain't playing at all. Playing, that's what you'll do!'

Maybe she was being taken seriously! breathed the ecstatic Bethel.

Andy and Mahala were burlesquing their last scene in Stage Door.

ANDY: By the way, you are my girl, aren't you, Maggie? You know I'm co-director of the Nutmeg Players.

MAHALA: Okay. Here's where I kiss you--only I don't--it's after eleven-thirty and it'd cost you time and a half overtime, Equity ruling.

ANDY: Roscoe would never stand for that, so we'll just pay a spiritual tribute to your great future on the stage.

MAHALA: No, 'tis something else I want, too--a room of my own.

ANDY: And that's your curtain line? What kind of an ending is that for a romantic play!