Alva dragged her in there after the match. The young men lounged on high stools, drinking soda from bottles through straws, and singing 'She Didn't Say Yes, She Didn't Say No'.
The sanctities of Prohibition had more than two years to run, and the young people still considered it a social duty to drink raw gin. The oldest of their group--Morris Bass, the handsome, the fast-driving, the generous, the loudly lecherous, eighteen and the sole scion of a catsup factory--was urging on them cheer from a gin bottle with a counterfeited Gordon label. Alva had a shot of it in her root beer and began to giggle.
Not till now had anyone like Morris Bass ever given heed to Bethel, but this afternoon (she was flattered, so baronial was he in his pink-and-apricot sweater, his white-linen plus fours, his oiled chestnut hair) he dragged her by the arm to a bench outside the club shack, poured half a glass of gin into her sarsaparilla, and with heavily breathing satisfaction pushed his heavy arm about her waist . . . In her life, she had tasted gin perhaps twice; certainly no gallant had embraced her publicly. The Modern Merridays did not hold with drunkenness and public slobbering.
'Please!' she begged.
'What's a matter? Don't you like hootch?'
'Oh, yes, I think I do, but I've been playing tennis so hard--'
'Go on! Bottoms up!'
A stir of pride and rebellion ran through her profound shyness. She set the drink on the ground and drew his arm from about her.
'Little Puritan, eh? Haw, haw, haw!'
'No! I'm not! Of course I'm not!'
It must be admitted that to Bethel, like most children in most Sladesburys in the 1930's, it was worse to be prudish than to be loose. She was sorry that she didn't like to have Morris's thick red hand pawing her white linen blouse.
'No! Of course I'm not a Puritan!'
'Then what's a matter? First time I ever got a good eyeful of you, this afternoon. You played pretty good tennis. And you got nice legs. I guess you won't ever get thick ankles, and that's a girl's best point, believe you me. So what's eating you? Not afraid of a little necking, are you?'
He kissed her, greasily.
She was up and away from him, all in one compact movement. 'I just don't like uncooked beefsteak!'
She ran like a leopard.
As she reached home, her only conclusion was that 'necking' in itself seemed interesting but that, unfortunately, something in her would always make her sick of the Morris Basses and all persons who drank out of bottles and exploded in laughter. Were actors ever like Morris? she wondered. Would it keep her from being an actress?
'There won't be any people like that in my theatre, when I'm running a show!' she snapped; and it is curious, not to be explained, that she should have said that, because never in her life had she heard of an actor-manager, of an actress-producer.
She knew nothing beyond the names of Sarah Bernhardt and Duse and Mrs. Fiske and Ethel Barrymore; nothing of the young Helen Hayes, except as a movie actress, nor of the young Katharine Cornell, who just then was appearing in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Like a child born to be a painter, she got her ideas from the wind, the earth; and this moment she, who couldn't possibly have known about anything of the kind, saw herself in a star's dressing-room, halting her making-up to look at a bill for new props, and then, ever so gently and sympathetically, giving a drunken leading man his two weeks' notice.
After such eminence, it was with a good deal of quiet dignity that she went into the kitchen to help Gwendolyn, the youthful cook, wash the vegetables for dinner. (For fifteen years now the Modern Merridays had had evening dinner at seven instead of evening supper at six.)
'Have a nice time playing tennis?' bubbled Gwendolyn, who was the lady-love of a prominent bus driver.
'Oh--yes--pretty nice . . .'
(Silver lace and a tiara--the queen enthroned, centre-stage. Dirt-crusted bars and the hateful teeth of grinning guards--the queen waiting for the guillotine.)
'Still foggy near the river, Beth?'
'I don't--no, I don't guess it was quite so foggy.'
(A young farmwife who has hidden her murderer-husband in the attic, and who faces expressionless the searching sheriffs.)
'What're you so quiet about? Guess you must be in love.'
'I am not!' And Bethel shuddered. Love did not, to her, seem a mystery to be funny about.
With dignity and a degree of hunger for all the whipped cream of culture, she paraded royally into the living-room and put an aria from Carmen on the phonograph. She did not hear it through. She was so suddenly and bewilderingly sleepy that she dashed up to her little room and till dinnertime slept like a kitten.
The star is sleeping, as only stars can sleep.
With the blonde goddess, Alva Prindle, and Charley Hatch, the sturdy, soothing, rather stupid boy next door who was Bethel's trustiest friend, she went to the Connecticut Palace Motion Picture Theatre that evening, and breathlessly viewed The Heart of an Understudy.
There was, it seems, a woman star, beautiful but wicked, and jealously devoted to ruining the fine young leading man by scandal-hinting and cruel looks instead of by the simpler and much more effective weapon of upstaging him. This lady fiend had an understudy, a poor foundling girl, who had learned her histrionic craft in a Seventh Day Adventist Home for Orphans. The understudy hadn't a friend in the company except the kind young leading man, who carried her bags on overnight jumps.
So the wicked star also persecuted the understudy, till the glorious night when the star fell ill (with a particularly sudden onset of author's disease) and the understudy went on, and played so radiantly, so competently, that the critics and a lot of reporters--who just happened to be in the theatre on that ninety-third night of the New York run--wrote reports which were given two-column heads in all the dailies: 'Miss Dolly Daintree Greatest Theatrical Find of Years: Unknown Girl Thrills Thousands at the Pantaloon Theatre.'
The star seemed distinctly annoyed by this until, dying, she discovered that the unknown female genius was her own daughter, by some marriage that she had forgotten, and handed her over to the arms of the hero, along with a sizable estate--presumably so that they wouldn't have to go on acting.
It was a gorgeous movie, with shots of the Twentieth Century train, supper with the producer at the Waldorf, and gilt cupids on the star's pink bed. There was even a tricky shot in which a minor movie actor acted as though he were a trained actor acting.
When the screen had darkened, Bethel did not merely hope--she joyously knew that she was going to be an actress.
She confessed it to Alva and Charley Hatch at their after-theatre supper at the Rex Pharmacy and Luncheonette.
The Rex, a drugstore which was less of a drugstore than a bookstore, less of a bookstore than a cigar store, less of a cigar store than a restaurant, was characteristic of a somewhat confused purpose in American institutions, whereby the government has been a producer of plays and motion pictures, movie producers are owners of racing stables, churches are gymnasiums and dance halls, telegraph offices are agencies for flowers and tickets, authors are radio comedians, aviators are authors, and the noblest purpose of newspapers is to publish photographs of bathing girls.
The actual drug department at the Rex consisted of a short counter laden with perfume bottles and of a small dark man who looked angry; but along one whole side were magnificent booths with ebonite tables shining like black glass. Here, cosily, the three children, world-weary connoisseurs of radio programmes and ventilation systems for motor-cars, supped on a jumbo malted milk, a maple pecan sundae and a frosted coffee.