Vieux Carre Read online

  A curved staircase ascends from the rear of a dark narrow passageway from the street entrance to the kitchen area. From there it ascends to the third floor, or gabled attic with its mansard roof.

  A narrow hall separates the gabled cubicles from the studio (with skylight) which is occupied by Jane and Tye.

  Obviously the elevations of these acting areas can be only suggested by a few shallow steps: a realistic setting is impossible, and the solution lies mainly in very skillful lighting and minimal furnishings.

  PART ONE

  SCENE ONE

  WRITER [spotlighted downstage]: Once this house was alive, it was occupied once. In my recollection it still is but by shadowy occupants like ghosts. Now they enter the lighter areas of my memory.

  [Fade in dimly visible characters of the play, turning about in a stylized manner. The spotlight fades on the writer and is brought up on Mrs. Wire, who assumes her active character in the play.]

  MRS. WIRE: Nursie! Nursie—where’s my pillows?

  [Nursie is spotlighted on a slightly higher level, looking up fearfully at something. She screams.]

  Hey, what the hell is going on in there!

  NURSIE [running down in a sort of football crouch]: A bat, a bat’s in the kitchen!

  MRS. WIRE: Bat? I never seen a bat nowhere on these premises, Nursie.

  NURSIE: Why, Mizz Wire, I swear it was a bull bat up there in the kitchen. You tell me no bats, why, they’s a pack of bats that hang upside down from that ole banana tree in the courtyard from dark till daybreak, when they all scream at once and fly up like a—explosion of—damned souls out of a graveyard.

  MRS. WIRE: If such a thing was true—

  NURSIE: As God’s word is true!

  MRS. WIRE: I repeat, if such a thing was true—which it isn’t—an’ you go tawkin’ about it with you big black mouth, why it could ruin the reputation of this rooming house which is the only respectable rooming house in the Quarter. Now where’s my pillows, Nursie?

  NURSIE [sotto voce as she arranges the pallet]: Shit . . .

  MRS. WIRE: What you say?

  NURSIE: I said shoot . . . faw shit. You’d see they’re on the cot if you had a light bulb in this hall. [She is making up the cot.] What you got against light? First thing God said on the first day of creation was, “Let there be light.”

  MRS. WIRE: You hear him say that?

  NURSIE: You never read the scriptures.

  MRS. WIRE: Why should I bother to read ’em with you quotin’ ’em to me like a female preacher. Book say this, say that, makes me sick of the book. Where’s my flashlight, Nursie?

  NURSIE: ’Sunder the pillows. [She stumbles on a heavy knapsack.] Lawd! What that there?

  MRS. WIRE: Some crazy young man come here wantin’ a room. I told him I had no vacancies for Bourbon Street bums. He dropped that sack on the floor and said he’d pick it up tomorrow, which he won’t unless he pays fifty cents for storage . . .

  NURSIE: It’s got something written on it that shines in the dark.

  MRS. WIRE: “Sky”—say that’s his name. Carry it on upstairs with you, Nursie.

  NURSIE: Mizz Wire, I cain’t hardly get myself up them steps no more, you know that.

  MRS. WIRE: Shoot.

  NURSIE: Mizz Wire, I think I oughta inform you I’m thinkin’ of retirin’.

  MRS. WIRE: Retirin’ to what, Nursie? The banana tree in the courtyard with the bats you got in your head?

  NURSIE: They’s lots of folks my age, black an’ white, that’s called bag people. They just wander round with paper bags that hold ev’rything they possess or they can collect. Nights they sleep on doorsteps: spend days on boxes on corners of Canal Street with a tin cup. They get along: they live—long as intended to by the Lord.

  MRS. WIRE: Yor place is with me, Nursie.

  NURSIE: I can’t please you no more. You keep callin’ Nursie, Nursie, do this, do that, with all these stairs in the house and my failin’ eyesight. No Ma’am, it’s time for me to retire.

  [She crosses upstage. The kitchen area is dimly lighted. Nursie sits at the table with a cup of chicory coffee, eyes large and ominously dark as the continent of her race.

  [A spot of light picks up the writer dimly at the entrance to the hall.]

  MRS. WIRE: Who? Who?

  WRITER: It’s—

  MRS. WIRE: You . . .

  WRITER: Mrs. Wire, you’re blinding me with that light. [He shields his left eye with a band.]

  MRS. WIRE [switching off the light]: Git upstairs, boy. We’ll talk in the mawnin’ about your future plans.

  WRITER: I have no plans for the future, Mrs. Wire.

  MRS. WIRE: That’s a situation you’d better correct right quick.

  [The writer, too, collides with the bizarre, colorfully decorated knapsack.]

  WRITER: What’s—?

  MRS. WIRE: Carry that sack upstairs with you. Nursie refused to.

  [With an effort the writer shoulders the sack and mounts a step or two to the kitchen level.]

  WRITER: Mrs. Wire told me to carry this sack up here.

  NURSIE: Just put it somewhere it won’t trip me up.

  WRITER: Sky? Sky?

  NURSIE: She say that’s his name. Whose name? I think her mind is goin’ on her again. Lately she calls out, “Timmy, Timmy,” or she carries on conversations with her dead husband, Horace . . .

  WRITER: A name—Sky? [To himself.] Shines like a prediction.

  [He drops the knapsack at the edge of the kitchen light and wanders musingly back to the table. Nursie automatically pours him a cup of chicory.

  [Again the area serving as the entrance passage is lighted, and the sound of a key scraping at a resistant lock is heard.]

  MRS. WIRE [starting up from her cot]: Who? Who?

  [Jane enters exhaustedly.]

  JANE: Why, Mrs. Wire, you scared me! [She has an elegance about her and a vulnerability.]

  MRS. WIRE: Miss Sparks, what’re you doin’ out so late on the streets of the Quarter?

  JANE: Mrs. Wire, according to the luminous dial on my watch, it is only ten after twelve.

  MRS. WIRE: When I give you a room here . . .

  JANE: Gave me? I thought rented . . .

  MRS. WIRE: [cutting through]: I told you a single girl was expected in at midnight.

  JANE: I’m afraid I didn’t take that too seriously. Not since I lived with my parents in New Rochelle, New York, before I went to college, have I been told to be in at a certain hour, and even then I had my own key and disregarded the order more often than not. However! I am going to tell you why and where I’ve gone tonight. I have gone to the all-night drugstore, Waterbury’s, on Canal Street, to buy a spray can of Black Flag, which is an insect repellent. I took a cab there tonight and made this purchase because, Mrs. Wire, when I opened the window without a screen in my room, a cockroach, a flying cockroach, flew right into my face and was followed by a squadron of others. Well! I do not have an Oriental, a Buddhistic tolerance for certain insects, least of all a cockroach and even less a flying one. Oh, I’ve learned to live reluctantly with the ordinary pedestrian kind of cockroach, but to have one fly directly into my face almost gave me convulsions! Now as for the window without a screen, if a screen has not been put in that window by tomorrow, I will buy one for it myself and deduct the cost from next month’s rent. [She goes past Mrs. Wire toward the steps.]

  MRS. WIRE: Hold on a minute, young lady. When you took your room here, you gave your name as Miss Sparks. Now is that young fellow that’s living up there with you Mr. Sparks, and if so why did you register as Miss instead of Mrs.?

  JANE: I’m sure you’ve known for some time that I’m sharing my room with a young man, whose name is not Mr. Sparks, whose name is Tye McCool. And if that offends your moral scruples—well—sometimes it offends mine, too.

  MRS. WIRE: If I had not been a young lady myself once! Oh yes, once, yaiss! I’d have evicted both so fast you’d think that . . .

  JANE: No, I’ve stopped think
ing. Just let things happen to me.

  [Jane is now at the stairs and starts up them weakly. Mrs. Wire grunts despairingly and falls back to her cot. Jane enters the kitchen.]

  NURSIE: Why, hello, Miss Sparks.

  JANE: Good evening, Nursie—why is Mrs. Wire sleeping in the entrance hall?

  NURSIE: Lawd, that woman, she got the idea that 722 Toulouse Street is the address of a jailhouse. And she’s the keeper—have some hot chick’ry with me?

  JANE: Do you know I still don’t know what chicory is? A beverage of some kind?

  NURSIE: Why chicory’s South’n style coffee.

  JANE: Oh, well, thank you, maybe I could try a bit of it to get me up that flight of stairs . . .

  [She sits at the table. Below, the door has opened a third time. The painter called Nightingale stands in the doorway with a pickup.]

  MRS. WIRE: Who? Ah!

  NIGHTINGALE [voice rising]: Well, cousin, uh, Jake . . .

  PICKUP [uneasily]: Blake.

  NIGHTINGALE: Yes, we do have a lot of family news to exchange. Come on in. We’ll talk a bit more in my room.

  MRS. WIRE: In a pig’s snout you will!

  NIGHTINGALE: Why, Mrs. Wire! [He chuckles, coughs.] Are you sleeping in the hall now?

  MRS. WIRE: I’m keeping watch on the comings and goings at night of tenants in my house.

  NIGHTINGALE: Oh, yes, I know your aversion to visitors at night, but this is my first cousin. I just bumped into him at Gray Goose bus station. He is here for one day only, so I have taken the license of inviting him in for a little family talk since we’ll have no other chance.

  MRS. WIRE: If you had half the cousins you claim to have, you’d belong to the biggest family since Adam’s.

  PICKUP: Thanks, but I got to move on. Been nice seeing you—cousin . . .

  NIGHTINGALE: Wait—here—take this five. Go to the America Hotel on Exchange Alley just off Canal Street, and I will drop in at noon tomorrow—cousin . . . [He starts to cough.]

  PICKUP: Thanks, I’ll see ya, cousin.

  MRS. WIRE: Hah, cousin.

  [Nightingale coughs and spits near her cot.]

  Don’t you spit by my bed!

  NIGHTINGALE: Fuck off, you old witch!

  MR. WIRE: What did you say to me?

  NIGHTINGALE: Nothing not said to and about you before! [He mounts the steps.]

  MRS. WIRE: Nursie! Nursie! [Receiving no response she lowers herself with a groan onto the cot.]

  NIGHTINGALE [starting up the stairs]: Midnight staircase—still in—your [coughs] fatal position . . . [He climbs slowly up.]

  [The writer, Jane, and Nursie are in the kitchen. The crones enter, wild-eyed and panting with greasy paper bags. The kitchen area is lighted.]

  MARY MAUDE: Nursie? Miss Carrie and I ordered a little more dinner this evening than we could eat, so we had the waiter put the remains of the, the—

  MISS CARRIE [her wild eyes very wild]: The steak “Diane,” I had the steak Diane and Mary Maude had the chicken “bonne femme.” But our eyes were a little bigger than our stomachs.

  MARY MAUDE: The sight of too much on a table can kill your appetite! But this food is too good to waste.

  MISS CARRIE: And we don’t have ice to preserve it in our room, so would you kindly put it in Mrs. Wire’s icebox, Nursie.

  NURSIE: The last time I done that Miss Wire raised Cain about it, had me throw it right out. She said it didn’ smell good.

  JANE: I have an icebox in which I’d be glad to keep it for you ladies.

  MARY MAUDE: Oh, that’s very kind of you!

  WRITER [rising from the kitchen table]: Let me carry it up.

  [He picks up the greasy bags and starts upstairs. Miss Carrie’s asthmatic respiration has steadily increased. She staggers with a breathless laugh.]

  MARY MAUDE: Oh, Miss Carrie, you better get right to bed. She’s having another attack of her awful asthma. Our room gets no sun, and the walls are so damp, so—dark . . .

  [They totter out of the light together.]

  NURSIE [averting her face from the bag with a sniff of repugnance]: They didn’t go to no restaurant. They been to the garbage pail on the walk outside, don’t bother with it, it’s spoiled [pointing upstage] just put it over there, I’ll throw it out.

  JANE: I wonder if they’d be offended if I bought them a sack of groceries at Solari’s tomorrow.

  NURSIE: Offend ’em did you say?

  JANE: I meant their pride.

  NURSIE: Honey, they gone as far past pride as they gone past mistaking a buzzard for a bluebird.

  [She chuckles. Tye appears. Jane pretends not to notice.]

  JANE: I’m afraid pride’s an easy thing to go past sometimes. I am living—I am sharing my studio with a, an addicted—delinquent, a barker at a—stripshow joint. [She has pretended to ignore Tye’s disheveled, drugged, but vulnerably boyish appearance at the edge of the light.]

  TYE [in a slurred voice]: You wouldn’t be tawkin’ about—nobody—present . . .

  JANE: Why, hello, Tye. How’d you get back so early? How’d you get back at all, in this—condition?

  TYE: Honey! If I didn’t have my arms full of—packages.

  JANE: The less you say out loud about the hot merchandise you’ve been accumulating here . . .

  TYE: Babe, you’re asking for a— [He doubles his fist.]

  JANE: Which I’d return with a kick in the balls! [She gasps.] My Lord, did I say that?

  MRS. WIRE: What’s that shoutin’ about?

  [Jane breaks into tears. She falls back into the chair and buries her head in her arms.]

  TYE: Hey, love, come here, I knocked off work early to be with you—do you think I’d really hit you?

  JANE: I don’t know . . .

  TYE: Come to—bed . . .

  JANE: Don’t lean on me.

  [They cross out of the light. The writer looks after them wistfully as the light dims out.]

  SCENE TWO

  The writer has undressed and is in bed. Nightingale coughs—a fiendish, racking cough. He is hacking and spitting up bloody phlegm. He enters his cubicle.

  Then across the makeshift partition in the writer’s cubicle, unlighted except by a faint glow in its alcove window, another sound commences—a sound of dry and desperate sobbing which sounds as though nothing in the world could ever appease the wound from which it comes: loneliness, inborn and inbred to the bone.

  Slowly, as his coughing fit subsides, Nightingale, the quick-sketch artist, turns his head in profile to the sound of the sobbing. Then the writer, across the partition, is dimly lighted, too. He is also sitting up on his cot, staring at the partition between his cell and Nightingale’s.

  Nightingale clears his throat loudly and sings hoarsely and softly a pop song of the era such as “If I Didn’t Care” or “Paper Doll.” Slowly the audience of one whom he is serenading succeeds in completely stifling the dry sobbing with a pillow. Nightingale’s voice rises a bit as he gets up and lights a cigarette; then he goes toward the upstage limit of the dim stage lighting and makes the gesture of opening a door.

  He moves into the other gable room of the attic and stands, silent, for several beats of the song as the writer slowly, reluctantly, turns on his cot to face him.

  NIGHTINGALE: . . . I want to ask you something.

  WRITER: Huh?

  NIGHTINGALE: The word “landlady” as applied to Mrs. Wire and to all landladies that I’ve encountered in my life—isn’t it the biggest one-word contradiction in the English language? [The writer is embarrassed by Nightingale’s intrusion and steady scrutiny,] She owns the land, yes, but is the witch a lady? Mind if I switch on your light?

  WRITER: The bulb’s burned out.

  NIGHTINGALE [chuckles and coughs]: She hasn’t replaced a burnt-out light bulb in this attic since I moved here last spring. I have to provide my own light bulbs by unscrewing them from the gentleman’s lavatory at the City of the Two Parrots, where I ply my trade. Temporarily, you know. Doing portraits in pa
stel of the tourist clientele. [His voice is curiously soft and intimate, more as if he were speaking of personal matters.]

  Of course I . . . [He coughs and clears his throat.] . . . have no shame about it, no guilt at all, since what I do there is a travesty of my talent, I mean a prostitution of it, I mean, painting these tourists at the Two Parrots, which are actually two very noisy macaws. Oh, they have a nice patio there, you know, palm trees and azaleas when in season, but the cuisine and the service . . . abominable. The menu sometimes includes cockroaches . . . (There are a lot of great eating places in New Orleans, like Galatoire’s, Antoine’s, Arnaud’s in the Vieux Carré and . . . Commander’s Palace and Plantation House in the Garden District . . . lovely old mansions, you know, converted to restaurants with a gracious style . . . haunted by dead residents, of course, but with charm . . .)

  [This monologue is like a soothing incantation, interspersed with hoarseness and coughing.]

  Like many writers, I know you’re a writer, you’re a young man of very few spoken words, compared to my garrulity.

  WRITER: Yes, I . . .

  NIGHTINGALE: So far, kid, you’re practically . . . monosyllabic.

  WRITER: I . . . don’t feel well . . . tonight.

  NIGHTINGALE: That’s why I intruded. You have a candle on that box beside your cot.

  WRITER: Yes, but no matches.

  NIGHTINGALE: I have matches, I’ll light it. Talk is easier . . . [He strikes the match and advances to the writer’s bedside.] . . . between two people visible to each other, if . . . not too sharply . . . [He lights the candle.] Once I put up for a night in a flophouse without doors, and a gentleman entered my cubicle without invitation, came straight to my cot and struck a match, leaned over me peering directly into my face . . . and then said, “No,” and walked out . . . as if he assumed that I would have said, “Yes.” [He laughs and coughs.]