When the season ended, he went to New York, armed with a letter of introduction from the summer-playhouse manager, to tackle the theater there. After heartbreaking months he managed to get a job, and then after he’d worked like a dog over his lights and gelatin slides and dissolves and all the rest of it, the play promptly closed down after its second performance. Presently he landed another, and it went on like that.
One or two of the reviews even had a line of praise in them for the lighting effects, which is a very unusual thing. But you can’t eat lines of praise, and his name was never mentioned, anyway, so who cared?
“It still wasn’t my kind of work. It was a dead end. And the layoff between shows was awfully long sometimes.”
Then one night the leading lady of the current particular show he’d lighted caught him in the act of taking candid shots of her from the wings as she came off. She got him to show her the finished prints the next day, and she was so impressed when she looked them over, she offered to buy them from him. He gave them to her instead. One thing led to another, and in the course of conversation he told her what his dream was. She ended up by staking him to it, advancing him enough money to open his own studio and start out by himself.
“Everyone in the case, of course, thought there was something else behind it. She was a woman about forty and she was known to have a weakness for much younger men. But there was nothing like that in back of it at all. As a matter of fact she was very much in love with somebody else right at the very time. But she was a great humanitarian, and she believed enough in my talent and ability to want to help me. That was all there was to it. And I made a point of seeing to it that she got back every penny of that loan by the time I was through.”
She knew he had; that was his characteristic.
“She was my first sitter. And she let me display one of the portraits I made of her under glass alongside the street entrance to the studio. The publicity helped. She didn’t need it; I did.”
He left at about eleven. Not much had been accomplished, but at least a start had been made. The groundwork had been laid. They were “Vick” and “Madeline” to one another now. And he owed her a dinner. That was important, because he had an abnormally acute sense of reciprocal obligation, she had detected that about him already. What he owed, he repaid.
At any rate, the ball had started rolling.
He called a week later, toward the end of the week.
“Vick Herrick.”
“Hello, Vick.”
“I’ve been given two tickets to a show, and if you’re not doing anything tonight, I was wondering if you’d care to take it in with me.”
“I would,” she said immediately.
“Have dinner with me first and—”
“No,” she said, just as immediately. “Give me a rain check on the dinner part.” She wanted to keep the obligation going, so she would have that much of a lien on seeing him a third time.
“You won’t let me buy you dinner?” he said, crestfallen.
“Next time around I will, not tonight. But I will take in the show with you, and you can buy me a cup of coffee afterward. I like to sit up late and talk.”
“All right, I’ll pick you up at the hotel.”
“I can meet you at the theater, if you want.”
“No, it’s one of these off-trail playhouses, you might have a hard time finding it. I’ll stop by for you at eight.”
She waited for him just inside the lobby entrance, in order to save time and trouble. Since this wasn’t a romance, there was no reason for playing coy or hard to get and making him come inside, call up to her room, and all the rest of the courtship trimmings.
She recognized him through the cab window as it drove up, went outside, and joined him just as he opened the door and stepped out.
“How’s that for timing?” she asked cheerfully.
“To a tee,” he grinned. “You’re the kind of person I’d like to have along when I have to make a train in a hurry.”
The backtracking lights outside stippled their faces as the cab got underway again.
“Get your pictures all right?”
“Vick, they’re simply incredible. How do you do it?”
“It’s my métier, as the French say. By the way, you never did tell me — just what were you thinking when you got that marvelous hike into your brows?”
She laughed. “You know something? If I were to tell you, you’d be the one with a hike in your brows.”
“I don’t guarantee this thing we’re going to,” he said. “It was done in New York two years ago, at one of the little off-Broadway theaters. Even then, I don’t think professionals were in it. So tonight you might say we’re going to see a road company of an amateur production.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said leniently. “It’ll be an experience, at least.”
It was. It was called The Connection, and it had something to do with narcotic addiction. Other than that, what it was about was completely undecipherable. The stage was set in the center of the audience the way a boxing ring is. It was furnished with two or three wood-backed chairs and that was all. Two or three men stood in one corner of it talking. Occasionally one or the other of them would move about a little, then rejoin the others. And that was the extent of the dramatic action.
Madeline wasn’t too put out about it; she was there on behalf of dramatic action of her own, and not to watch that of others. What did jar her occasionally was to glimpse other faces in the audience looking her way through the actors’ legs whenever they made a move or took a stand. It destroyed all chances the play might have had of weaving an illusion.
At one point they both turned simultaneously and looked at one another.
“I can hear them perfectly,” she said under her breath. “Their delivery is good. But I can’t make out what they’re talking about.”
“I was just going to say the same thing to you,” he chuckled. “I think a lot of it is users’ slang, that’s why. Drug users, you know.”
They stayed on for a rather valiant length of time at that, but finally gave up the struggle and left when it showed no signs of stopping.
“I don’t know how we would have known when it was over, anyway,” she remarked on their way out. “They had no curtain.”
“One way of telling it wasn’t going on anymore might have been by the general perking up in the surrounding atmosphere. I really owe you an apology.”
“No, you don’t at all. It’s part of the scene around us today. A tiny part, but still a part. Maybe drug addicts do stand around like that and just wait; I’ve never known any of them. Still, I’m glad we took it in.”
“It was very avant-garde, I suppose. But why couldn’t it be that and at the same time lucid? They never are.”
“I don’t care for any of that stuff,” she told him decidedly. “I must have been born a hundred years too late.”
It was true. She was a formalist. She had been born old-fashioned. She wanted plot in her plays (à la Shakespeare); she wanted a melody in her music (à la Verdi, à la Strauss); she wanted a reproduction of the natural image in her paintings, her art (à la Rembrandt, Titian, Raphael). Those men were good enough for her.
She wasn’t interested in kindergarten-age children’s crayon daubings when done by grown-ups. Or reefer dreams improvised out of a slide trombone without any notes to back them up. Or sculpture done with chicken wire. Or people on a stage who talked but didn’t move.
For her it had to be laid on the line, circle-perfect, rounded out, no gaps left to be filled in.
And it must have been something of this feeling for completion, for symmetry, that lay at the bottom of her compulsion to finish out Starr’s life for her. The original guilt complex wasn’t solely responsible for it any longer; that would have worn thin by this time.