It was a fine touch, I thought, and from time to time throughout the play, sometimes for reason of plot and sometimes not, that exciting dit-dit . . . dit-dit-dit would come sparking out to startle and please us.
I began to suspect that The Pale Face Kid was Wilson Mizner’s creation and favorite, because he seemed in on most of what I took to be Mizner lines. On deck trying to make conversation with Etta, a good-looking young passenger, he had trouble finding something to say, and finally blurted out, “Did you notice the sea?”
And later, playing shuffleboard with Etta, he did pretty well even though it was his first time. Where had he learned? Etta wondered. “Used to play it all the time,” said the Kid, “at home on the lawn.”
“On the lawn? Can you slide them on the grass?”
“Of course not,” said the Kid, thinking fast. “Ah . . . we used to roll them.”
To Deep Sea Kitty, he said, “Can you get a lawyer to do that?”
“Sure! I could get a lawyer to scuttle this ship for the court costs.” And: “When the time comes for perjury, we’ll coach you like a first-class lawyer would.” When a passenger asked the Kid, “Where do you stop in London?” the Kid said, “Westminster Abbey.”
I thought I saw another aspect of the strange and contradictory Mizner in a deck scene between McSherry and a detective who was on board to help him with the crooks. The dinner gong had rung, everyone else gone, and talking to McSherry, the detective noticed something in McSherry’s inside coat pocket. He reached forward to tap it, saying, “Looks like a green baize shuffling board in your pocket.” A what? I’d never heard of such a thing, and I don’t think the audience had. But “a green baize shuffling board” could hardly be an invention, could it? McSherry said, “I shuffle sometimes when I’m thinking, but I don’t play anymore.” And when the detective left, McSherry sat down, brought out a marvelous little foldup board, and opened it to form a green-covered surface on his lap. Then, staring thoughtfully out to sea, his hands endlessly and fluently shuffled a deck of cards. Who would carry a foldup board just for shuffling? Nobody except a man practicing undetectable crooked shuffles. Did this come out of Wilson Mizner’s own strange past? I’ll bet it did. But watching McSherry up there, I wanted a green baize shuffling board too. Dit-dit-dit-dit-dit! said the radio shack, McSherry jumped up, and the play continued.
Curtain down on Act Two, houselights up, and out to the lobby for intermission, and some kind of pink stuff to drink. Then back for a fast curtain rise on what looked like and was a poker game in a smoky cabin, portholes on the back wall.
The Times’s advance review said, “That poker game was a delight,” and it was. Because it seemed real, a poker game right out of Wilson Mizner’s life, I was sure of it. The men up there in shirtsleeves, vests hanging open, puffing real smoke from real cigars, talked like real poker players. “Great draw, wasn’t it?” said one grinning player, pulling in a pot, and a sour loser replied, “Never mind the ancient history.” A player dropped out of a pot, throwing in his losing hand and saying disgustedly, “Fight it out between you.” A man walked around his chair to change his luck. “Say, don’t you ever ante?” one player said to another. “Sure,” was the answer, “when forced.” Looking up there at the players on the stage around a hexagonal poker table in “The Card Room: Evening, Same Day” was like watching an actual game. They said and did what poker players really say and do. “You couldn’t open your mouth with these,” said a player of his cards. A loser whose turn it was to deal started gathering up discarded cards, saying irritably, “Come on with the discards. Speed! Speed! Discards!” “I can’t draw my breath,” said another disgusted loser. A man laid down a winning hand of three kings, saying, as poker players probably always will, “Three monarchs of all they survey!” The steady obligatory insults never stopped. “You deal like you’re dividing a box of soda crackers.” This fine Wilson Mizner poker game ended with McSherry using his old skill as a former card shark, refined just before the game with practice on the green baize shuffling board, to outwit the con men by dealing from the middle of the deck.
The red velvet curtain came down on the climax of the scene, the crooks outwitted by McSherry, the sucker raking in his huge pot. And then—I counted—there were seven curtain calls just for the scene, the play not over. Each call built to growing applause, the sixth being the sucker, who walked out for his bow with his hands full of the money he’d just won—which brought down the house. And finally McSherry, and we really and truly gave him a great hand—he’d just outwitted the crooks! Then, the applause dying, we all sat grinning, the theater buzzing with talk: we were loving this.
Fourth act, curtain rise on the thrilling dit-dit-dit-dit from the radio shack—“Midnight on the Hurricane Deck”—and the play pretty quickly resolved itself. Finally—the gang outfoxed by McSherry, the reformed cardsharp—The Greyhound either jumped or fell to his death over the side of the ship in the last and best effect of the play. We saw him plunge over the side . . . then silence through a long two seconds, the others up there on the hurricane deck staring down after him, horrified . . . Then we heard the splash! Heard it, and an instant later saw the top of an actual spout of water appear at the ship’s rail! And—a brilliant touch—this splash appeared a little further down along the rail because the ship, you see, was moving. “Man overboard!” someone yelled, and with my lovely Claire in McSherry’s arms, the final curtain began descending to—don’t ask me why—the wonderfully, hissingly dramatic dit-dit-dit of the wireless. And then, for the very first time in the play, a sudden blast of sound filling the theater, shaking the walls, from the great ship’s horn blasting over and over along with that urgent dit-dit-dit as the swaying gold tassels gradually lowered. You couldn’t think for the sound, and we went wild, went crazy. For this we’d have pounded our palms if we hadn’t even seen the play.
But I didn’t forget why I was here. Got my hat from under my seat, swung my legs out to stand in the aisle, and, crouching low, hustled up the dark aisle; and the deep blast of the horn and the electric sparking dit-dit-dit of the wireless gave a wild urgency to what I was doing, a thrill of drama and excitement. Z would be out there. He really would, I knew it! Out on the walk in the next few minutes, and I’d be there waiting to see his face.
Across the tiled floor of the lobby, empty except for a pair of Gibson girls talking, and I was the very first of the audience to reach the sidewalk in front of the Knickerbocker. Somewhere, maybe a block or so away, the Dove Lady was walking toward me.
A man came out of the theater, glanced at me, carefully fitted on his derby, then walked off. Up the street the Times tower stood against the blue-white sky. Three women came out of the theater, all talking, laughing, none listening. A few more . . . Then suddenly the crowd came surging through every door, some immediately walking off, but a lot of them simply stopping dead on the walk to chatter. Now pedestrians had to wind their way through this swelling crowd, and I stood watching, excited but worried. Because I didn’t know what exactly I was looking for, and when the Dove Lady came walking by, as she would . . . with Z staring after her, as he would . . . just what would I see? What if “Dove Lady” was only a name, nothing I could actually recognize?