'Huh? Don't be silly. And I could almost like Mack. He's got such a cute moustache. Of course he's got a wife and children. Maybe she's cold. I dunno. You been in summer stock, haven't you, Ally?'
'Yuh. Up at Whale Hollow, upstate, and did I get a raw deal! I knew that director, Carv Bledaud, was a heel. Oh, last spring, I was nuts about it. My first real job. Remember I came into the Roanoke here yelling "To-day is a very big day. To-day is a day that will go down in history. The history of the theatre will star this date along with the death of Joe Jefferson and the birth of Shirley Temple". But all the time my intuition told me it was the bunk. When my intuition tells me something, I always know it's right, but I'd do anything--except let a lot of screwballs make love to me--to get on the stage. Well, I got up there, and I found Bledaud was a washout. He never read clear through a script before he started 'directing', and there were only 278 seats in the house, and the stage is so small that when they put on a chariot race, they use carpet sweepers. Oh, I stuck it out, but I never had a part more'n six sides. I was disgusted. . . . Where you living, Bunk?'
'Three of us got a furnished room with a kitchenette, in the West Fifties.'
'I'm going to stick it out at the Y.W.C.A., though all the bosses there try to persuade you to go back home to your beautiful home in Scranton and marry the boy friend. My beautiful home's next to the Adventist Church--you can hear 'em singing all Saturday morning, when you want to sleep--and the boy friend is a grocer, but even if my folks lived in a penthouse, I'd stick it out here. Nobody can keep me from succeeding on the stage! If I get just a little more busted, maybe I can get on the Federal Theatre Project. They don't take you there for how well you can act but for had badly you can earn a living. But anyway, I'll stick it if it takes ten years.'
Bunk half rose. 'I got to get out and chase a job. I'm an actor. As beautiful as you two dolls are, I'll never make a dime here.'
Said Peg, 'Don't take all the jobs to-day. Keep a few for another day. You coming back from the Borsch circuit with all that dough saved up! I knew you were in the chips the minute I saw you. You had your face washed and your hair combed.'
Bunk settled down again and ordered a coffee. 'Saved up? Listen! The minute my old man found I had a job, he started panhandling . . .'
Bethel knew that the three would stay here all afternoon, talking of nothing but the stage--nothing but their particular chances of positions on the stage; that they would be back here at their café of futility to-morrow and the next day, next year and the year after, till they vanished into that undiscoverable limbo where, dead or still living, float all the young actors and novelists and prize fighters and promoters of billion-dollar sun-power plants whose exhibitionism was too great for their talent and whose talent was too great for farming.
Bethel had been reared to the solid American Protestant belief in the glory and efficacy of human will power. If anyone wanted enough to do anything, he would unquestionably do it, and his resoluteness was somehow very beautiful, even if his ambition was to devour the moon or become the Queen of Sheba.
Every minute, among the young things seated in rows in managers' waiting-rooms, Bethel heard them bravely and just a bit noisily vowing, 'I will make good on the stage, and nothing can stop me'.
That was inspiring. That was how we built the Union Pacific.
But she saw that a number of those who were most courageously willing to give-up-everything for their careers believed that the giving-up-everything automatically extended to their families and friends, and that it was the natural duty of their fathers to go on sending them funds and of their barest acquaintances to go on 'lending' them money, while, year on year, they sat in restaurants and enjoyed their artistic martyrdom.
This was all very confusing to Bethel. Was she a real worker, or just another soft little faker in a funny hat? Um. Well, she'd prove herself. She wouldn't for ever let her father go on supporting her. She'd type or wait on table or model or something. Meanwhile it depressed her to see that there were hundreds of authentic, nonboasting aspirants who seemed to be as good as she. If she ever did have her chance on the stage, it would be mostly by accident.
A horrible dislocation, this present theatrical situation. No wonder the young Communists at the Olde Roanoke were able to be eloquent! For every actual stage job, there were ten brilliant young actors being considered, a hundred who ought to be considered, and a thousand heartbroken youngsters, ranging from good to atrocious, who thought they ought to be. And when someone out of the thousand, anyone, finally was signed for the role, all the other nine hundred and ninety-nine wailed that this was the blackest example of favouritism, incompetence and sickening bad taste in all the history of the arts.
Why, she sharply asked herself, did she go on being huddled in this herd, as just one of the thousand?
As she paid her check and wearily climbed up from the basement, Bethel decided that she would never go to the Olde Roanoke again.
There was a standard debate among the job hunters as to whether it was better to try to see the producers in the morning or in the afternoon. Bethel did both. This afternoon she knocked at the granite portals of two more theatrical tombs, then turned to that new heaven and high ambition, that putative new bed and bread and butter of the young actor, the radio.
To apply for tests for broadcasting, that ethereal art whereby the sweetness of the human voice is wafted to the listening seraphim ten trillion light-years away, she went not to a star-capped and venerable master of the air waves but to young men, in advertising agency offices, who would--just possibly--tell older men in the agency that, look, here's a kid that prob'ly she's no good but we might let her have a test.
She sat across a desk from a young man with eyeglasses and premature baldness.
'Come back in about a week. There might be something doing on the Cadgbury Health Salts Hour. How about coming out for a little dinner with me some night, Miss Dairyvale?' said the young man.
By now there was less pious horror than ritual boredom in her refusal.
She could not afford to, but at six she stopped in at a chain restaurant, where doughnuts were served on Medici tessellation, to have tea and toast, and to ask her waitress about a restaurant job.
'You got to have experience, and there's a long waiting list, anyway,' said the young woman.
Back home in her hotel, Bethel asked of the girl elevator runner, 'How do you go about getting a job like yours?'
'Busted, dearie? Then you better go home. No chance on the elevators. There's only a few buildings in town use girls--mostly hospitals and medical buildings--and when a girl leaves, she usually gets the job handed on to her lady friend. And of course you got to have experience before you can run an elevator,' said the operator, as the floors slipped downward past them.
'How do you get experience running an elevator if you don't get a chance to run an elevator?' sighed Bethel.
The young woman looked at her with dark suspicion. 'I don't know. But that's the rule.'
She was safely home again. She wasn't sure what had happened to her artistic integrity this day, but she did know that her feet were sore.
Again she slept till after nine in the evening.
She woke up and sat waiting for the telephone to ring. She imagined Walter Rolf, Marian Croy, even Iris Pentire calling her up, inviting her to some vague, exciting theatrical party; she imagined Pete and Toni, unexpectedly arrived in town, demanding that she come to Twenty-One or Sardi's. She was so lonely that she was frightened. The sound of the city blurred in one relentless mumbling.