“I can manage any accent,” said Arthur, miffed—and I instantly knew that he absolutely could not manage an American accent.
“A policeman!” Edna clapped her hands. “And you’ll be in love with me, dear! What larks.”
“I didn’t hear anything before about a policeman character,” said Mr. Herbert.
“Oh, no, Mr. Herbert,” said Peg. “The policeman has always been in the script.”
“What script?”
“The script you’ll commence writing tomorrow morning, at break of day.”
Mr. Herbert looked like he was about to be afflicted with a nervous disorder.
“Do I get a song of my own to sing?” asked Arthur.
“Oh,” said Peg. There was that pause again. “Yes. Benjamin, do be sure to write that song for Arthur, which we discussed. The policeman’s song, please.”
Benjamin held Peg’s gaze and repeated with only the slightest sarcasm: “The policeman’s song.”
“That’s correct, Benjamin. As we’ve already discussed.”
“Shall I just steal a policeman’s song from Gershwin, perhaps?”
But Peg was already turning her attention to me.
“Costumes!” she said brightly, and scarcely had the word left her mouth before Olive declared, “There will be virtually no budget for costumes.”
Peg’s face dropped. “Drat. I’d forgotten about that.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll buy everything at Lowtsky’s. Flapper dresses are simple.”
“Brilliant, Vivian,” said Peg. “I know you’ll take care of it.”
“On a strict budget,” Olive added.
“On a strict budget,” I agreed. “I’ll even throw in my own allowance if I have to.”
—
As the conversation continued, with everyone except Mr. Herbert getting more excited and making suggestions for the show, I excused myself to the powder room. When I came out, I almost ran into a good-looking young man with a wide tie and a rather wolfish expression, who’d been waiting for me in the corridor.
“Say, there, your friend’s a knockout,” he said, nodding in the direction of Celia. “And so are you.”
“That’s what we’ve been told,” I replied, holding his gaze.
“You girls wanna come home with me?” he asked, dispensing with the preliminaries. “I gotta friend with a car.”
I studied him more closely. He looked like a piece of very bad business. A wolf with an agenda. This was not somebody a nice girl should tangle with.
“We might,” I said, which was true. “But first we have a meeting to conclude, with our associates.”
“Your associates?” he scoffed, taking in our table with its odd and animated assortment of humanity: a coronary-inducingly gorgeous showgirl, a slovenly white-haired man in his shirtsleeves, a tall and dowdy middle-aged woman, a short and stodgy middle-aged woman, a stylishly dressed lady of means, a strikingly handsome man with a dramatic profile, and an elegant young black man in a perfectly tailored pinstripe suit. “What line of business yous in, doll?”
“We’re theater people,” I said.
As if we could have been anything else.
—
The following morning I woke up early as usual, suffering from my typical summer-of-1940 hangover. My hair stank of sweat and cigarettes, and my limbs were all tangled up in Celia’s limbs. (We had gone out with the wolf and his friend, after all—as I’m sure you’ll be flabbergasted beyond all reason to hear—and it had been a strenuous night. I felt like I’d just been fished out of the Gowanus Canal.)
I made my way to the kitchen where I found Mr. Herbert sitting with his forehead on the table and his hands folded politely in his lap. This was a new posture for him—a new low in dejectedness, I would say.
“Good morning, Mr. Herbert,” I said.
“I stand ready to review any evidence of it,” he replied, without lifting his forehead from the table.
“How are you feeling today?” I asked.
“Blithesome. Glorious. Exalted. I’m a sultan in his palace.”
He still hadn’t lifted his head.
“How’s the script coming along?”
“Be a humanitarian, Vivian, and stop asking questions.”
—
The next morning, I found Mr. Herbert in the same position—and several of the following mornings, too. I didn’t know how somebody could sit for so long with their forehead on a table without suffering an aneurysm. His mood never lifted, and neither—at least not that I saw—did his skull. Meanwhile, his notebook sat untouched beside him.
“Is he going to be all right?” I asked Peg.
“It’s not easy to write a play, Vivian,” she said. “The problem is, I’m asking him to write something good, and I’ve never asked that of him before. It’s got his head all screwy. But I think of it this way. During the war, the British army engineers always used to say: ‘We can do it, whether it can be done or not.’ That’s how the theater works, too, Vivian. Just like a war! I often ask people to do more than they are capable of—or I used to do, anyway, before I got old and soft. So, yes, I have full confidence in Mr. Herbert.”
I didn’t.
Celia and I came in late one night, drunk as usual, and we tripped over a body that was lying on the living room floor. Celia shrieked. I switched on a light and identified Mr. Herbert, lying there in the middle of the carpet on his back, staring up at the ceiling, with his hands folded over his chest. For an awful moment, I thought he was dead. Then he blinked.
“Mr. Herbert!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing?”
“Prophesizing,” he said, without moving.
“Prophesizing what?” I slurred.
“Doom,” he said.
“Well, then. Have a good night.” I turned off the light.
“Splendid,” he said quietly, as Celia and I stumbled to our room. “I will be certain to do just that.”
—
Meanwhile, as Mr. Herbert suffered, the rest of us went about the business of creating a play that did not yet have a script.
Peg and Benjamin had already gotten to work on the songs, sitting at the grand piano all afternoon, running through melodies and ideas for lyrics.
“I want Edna’s character to be called Mrs. Alabaster,” said Peg. “It sounds ostentatious, and a lot of words can rhyme with it.”
“Plaster, caster, master, bastard, Alabaster,” said Benjamin. “I can work with that.”
“Olive won’t let you say bastard. But go bigger. In the first number, when Mrs. Alabaster has lost all her money, make the song feel overly wordy, to show how fancy she is. Use longer words, to rhyme. Taskmaster. Toastmaster. Oleaster.”
“Or we can have the chorus run through a series of questions about her,” Benjamin suggested. “Like: Who asked her? Who passed her? Who grasped her?”
“Disaster! It attacked her!”
“The Depression, it smacked her—that poor Alabaster.”
“It gassed her. It smashed her. She’s poor as a pastor.”
“Hey there, Peg,” Benjamin suddenly stopping what he was playing. “My father’s a pastor and he’s not poor.”
“I don’t pay you to lift your hands off those piano keys, Benjamin. Keep noodling about. We were just getting somewhere.”
“You don’t pay me at all,” he said, folding his hands in his lap. “You haven’t paid me in three weeks! You haven’t paid anyone, I heard.”
“Is that true?” Peg asked. “What are you living on?”
“Prayers. And your leftover dinner.”
“Sorry, kiddo! I’ll talk to Olive about it. But not right now. Go back and start over, but add that thing you were doing that time when I walked in on you playing the piano, and I liked what I heard. You remember? That Sunday, when the Giants game was playing on the radio?”