Sweet Bird of Youth Read online

  CHANCE: Do you want to?

  PRINCESS [pointing]: Unfortunately I have to! Open the shutters!

  [He does. He remains by the open shutters, looking out as the Lament in the air

  continues.]

  CHANCE: --I was born in this town. I was born in St Cloud.

  PRINCESS: That's a good way to begin to tell your life story. Tell me your life story. I'm

  interested in it, I really would like to know it. Let's make it your audition, a sort of screen test for you. I can watch you in the mirror while I put my face on. And tell me your life story, and if you hold my attention with your life story, I'll know you have talent, I'll wire my studio on the Coast that I'm still alive and I'm on my way to the Coast with a young man named Chance

  Wayne that I think is cut out to be a great young star.

  CHANCE [moving out on the forestage]: Here is the town I was born in, and lived in till ten

  years ago, in St Cloud. I was a twelve-pound baby, normal and healthy, but with some kind of

  quantity 'X' in my blood, a wish or a need to be different. . . . The kids that I grew up with are mostly still here and what they call 'settled down', gone into business, married, and bringing up children; the little crowd I was in with, that I used to be the star of, was the snobset, the ones with the big names and money. I didn't have either. . . . [ The Princess utters a soft laugh in her dimmed-out area.] What I had was . . . [The Princess half-turns, brush poised in a faint, dusty beam of light.]

  PRINCESS: BEAUTY! Say it! Say it! What you had was beauty! I had it! I say it with pride,

  no matter how sad, being gone, now.

  CHANCE: Yes, well . . . the others . . . [The Princess resumes brushing hair and the sudden

  cold beam of light on her goes out again] . . . are all now members of the young social set here.

  The girls are young matrons, bridge-players, and the boys belong to the Junior Chamber of

  Commerce and some of them, clubs in New Orleans such as Rex and Comus and ride on the

  Mardi Gras floats. Wonderful? No, boring . . . I wanted, expected, intended to get, something better. . . . Yes, and I did, I got it. I did things that fat-headed gang never dreamed of. Hell, when they were still freshmen at Tulane or L. S. U. or Ole Miss, I sang in the chorus of the

  biggest show in New York, in Oklahoma, and had pictures in Life in a cowboy outfit, tossin' a ten-gallon hat in the air! YIP . . . EEEEEE! Ha-ha. . . . And at the same time pursued my other vocation. . . .

  Maybe the one one I was truly meant for, love-making . . . slept in the social register of

  New York! Millionaires' widows and wives and debutante daughters of such famous names as

  Vanderbrook and Masters and Halloway and Connaught, names mentioned daily in columns,

  whose credit cards are their faces. . . . And . . .

  PRINCESS: What did they pay you?

  CHANCE: I gave people more than I took. Middle-aged people I gave back a feeling of youth.

  Lonely girls? Understanding, appreciation! An absolutely convincing show of affection. Sad

  people, lost people? Something light and uplifting! Eccentrics? Tolerance, even odd things they long for. . . . But always just at the point when I might get something back that would solve my own need, which was great, to rise to their level, the memory of my girl would pull me back

  home to her . . . and when I came home for those visits, man oh man how that town buzzed with excitement. I'm telling you, it would blaze with it, and then that thing in Korea came along. I was about to be sucked into the Army so I went into the Navy, because a sailor's uniform suited me better, the uniform was all that suited me, though. . . .

  PRINCESS: Ah-ha!

  CHANCE [mocking her]: Ah-ha. I wasn't able to stand the goddam routine, discipline. . . .

  I kept thinking, this stops everything. I was twenty-three, that was the peak of my youth,

  and I knew my youth wouldn't last long. By the time I got out, Christ knows, I might be nearly thirty! Who would remember Chance Wayne? In a life like mine, you just can't stop, you know,

  can't take time out between steps, you've got to keep going right on up from one thing to the other; once you drop out, it leaves you and goes on without you and you're washed up.

  PRINCESS: I don't think I know what you're talking about.

  CHANCE: I'm talking about the parade. THE parade! The parade! the boys that go places, that's the parade I'm talking about, not a parade of swabbies on a wet deck. And so I ran my comb

  through my hair one morning and noticed that eight or ten hairs had come out, a warning signal of a future baldness. My hair was still thick. But would it be, five years from now, or even

  three? When the war would be over, that scared me, that speculation. I started to have bad

  dreams. Nightmares and cold sweats at night, and I had palpitations, and on my leaves I got

  drunk and woke up in strange places with faces on the next pillow I had never seen before. My eyes had a wild look in them in the mirror. . . . I got the idea I wouldn't live through the war, that I wouldn't come back, that all the excitement and glory of being Chance Wayne would go

  up in smoke at the moment of contact between my brain and a bit of hot steel that happened to be in the air at the same time and place that my head was . . . that thought didn't comfort me any. Imagine a whole lifetime of dreams and ambitions and hopes dissolving away in one

  instant, being blacked out like some arithmetic problem washed off a blackboard by a wet

  sponge, just by some little accident like a bullet, not even aimed at you but just shot off in space, and so I cracked up, my nerves did. I got a medical discharge out of the service and I came home in civvies, then it was when I noticed how different it was, the town and the people in it. Polite? Yes, but not cordial. No headlines in the papers, just an item that measured one

  inch at the bottom of page five saying that Chance Wayne, the son of Mrs Emily Wayne of North Front Street had received an honorable discharge from the Navy as the result of illness and was home to recover . . . that was when Heavenly became more important to me than

  anything else. . . .

  PRINCESS: Is Heavenly a girl's name?

  CHANCE: Heavenly is the name of my girl in St Cloud.

  PRINCESS: Is Heavenly why we stopped here?

  CHANCE: What other reason for stopping here can you think of?

  PRINCESS: So . . . I'm being used. Why not? Even a dead race horse is used to make glue. Is

  she pretty?

  CHANCE [handing Princess a snapshot]: This is a flashlight photo I took of her, nude, one

  night on Diamond Key, which is a little sandbar about half a mile off-shore which is under

  water at high tide. This was taken with the tide coming in. The water is just beginning to lap over her body like it desired her like I did and still do and will always, always, [Chance takes back the snapshot.] Heavenly was her name. You can see that it fits her. This was her at fifteen.

  PRINCESS: Did you have her that early?

  CHANCE: I was just two years older, we had each other that early.

  PRINCESS: Sheer luck!

  CHANCE: Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich

  and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers. I don't mean just

  ordinary pleasure or the kind you can buy, I mean great pleasure, and nothing that's happened to me or to Heavenly since can cancel out the many long nights without sleep when we gave each

  other such pleasure in love as very few people can look back on in their lives. . . .

  PRINCESS: No question, go on with your story.

  CHANCE: Each time I came back to St Cloud I had her love to come back to. . . .

  PRINCESS: S
omething permanent in a world of change?

  CHANCE: Yes, after each disappointment, each failure at something, I'd come back to her like

  going to a hospital.

  PRINCESS: She put cool bandages on your wounds? Why didn't you marry this Heavenly little physician?

  CHANCE: Didn't I tell you that Heavenly is the daughter of Boss Finley, the biggest political wheel in this part of the country? Well, if I didn't I made a serious omission.

  PRINCESS: He disapproved?

  CHANCE: He figured his daughter rated someone a hundred, a thousand per cent better than

  me, Chance Wayne. . . . The last time I came back here, she phoned me from the drugstore and

  told me to swim out to Diamond Key, that she would meet me there. I waited a long time, till

  almost sunset, and the tide started coming in before I heard the put-put of an outboard motor-boat coming out to the sandbar. The sun was behind her, I squinted. She had on a silky wet tank suit and fans of water and mist made rainbows about her . . . ? she stood up in the boat as if she was water-skiing, shouting things at me an' circling around the sandbar, around and around it!

  PRINCESS: She didn't come to the sandbar?

  CHANCE: No, just circled around it, shouting things at me. I'd swim toward the boat, I would

  just about reach it and she'd race it away, throwing up misty rainbows, disappearing in rainbows and then circling back and shouting things at me again. . . .

  PRINCESS: What things?

  CHANCE: Things like, 'Chance go away.' 'Don't come back to St Cloud.' 'Chance, you're a liar.'

  'Chance, I'm sick of your lies!' 'My father's right about you!' 'Chance, you're no good any more.'

  'Chance, stay away from St Cloud.' The last time around the sandbar she shouted nothing, just waved good-bye and turned the boat back to shore.

  PRINCESS: Is that the end of the story?

  CHANCE: Princess, the end of the story is up to you. You want to help me?

  PRINCESS: I want to help you. Believe me, not everybody wants to hurt everybody. I don't

  want to hurt you, can you believe me?

  CHANCE: I can if you prove it to me.

  PRINCESS: How can I prove it to you?

  CHANCE: I have something in mind.

  PRINCESS: Yes, what?

  CHANCE: O.K., I'll give you a quick outline of this project I have in mind. Soon as I've talked to my girl and shown her my contract, we go on, you and me. Not far, just to New Orleans,

  Princess. But no more hiding away, we check in at the Hotel Roosevelt there as Alexandra Del Lago and Chance Wayne. Right away the newspaper call you and you give a press conference. .

  . .

  PRINCESS: Oh?

  CHANCE: Yes! The idea briefly, a local contest of talent to find a pair of young people to star as unknowns in a picture you're planning to make to show your faith in YOUTH, Princess. You

  stage this contest, you invite other judges, but your decision decides it!

  PRINCESS: And you and . . . ?

  CHANCE: Yes, Heavenly and I win it. We get her out of St Cloud, we go to the West Coast

  together.

  PRINCESS: And me?

  CHANCE: You?

  PRINCESS: Have you forgotten, for instance, that any public attention is what I least want in the world?

  CHANCE: What better way can you think of to show the public that you're a person with

  bigger than personal interest?

  PRINCESS: Oh, yes, yes, but not true.

  CHANCE: You could pretend it was true.

  PRINCESS: If I didn't despise pretending!

  CHANCE: I understand. Time does it. Hardens people. Time and the world that you've lived in.

  PRINCESS: Which you want for yourself. Isn't that what you want? [She looks at him, goes to

  the phone, then speaks into phone] Cashier?

  Hello Cashier? This is the Princess Kosmonopolis speaking. I'm sending down a young

  man to cash some travelers' checks for me. [She hangs up.]

  CHANCE: And I want to borrow your Cadillac for a while. . . .

  PRINCESS: What for, Chance?

  CHANCE [posturing]: I'm pretentious. I want to be seen in your car on the streets of St Cloud.

  Drive all around town in it, blowing those long silver trumpets and dressed in the fine clothes you bought me. . . . Can I?

  PRINCESS: Chance, you're a lost little boy that I really would like to help find himself.

  CHANCE: I passed the screen test!

  PRINCESS: Come here, kiss me, I love you.

  [She faces the audience.]

  Did I say that? Did I mean it?

  [Then to Chance with arms outstretched.]

  What a child you are. . . . Come here. . . . [He ducks under her arms, and escapes to the

  chair.]

  CHANCE: I want this big display. Big phony display in your Cadillac around town. And a wad

  of dough to flash in their faces and the fine clothes you've bought me, on me.

  PRINCESS: Did I buy you fine clothes?

  CHANCE [picking up his jacket from the chair]: The finest. When you stopped being lonely

  because of my company at that Palm Beach Hotel, you bought me the finest. That's the deal for tonight, to toot those silver horns and drive slowly around in the Cadillac convertible so

  everybody that thought I was washed up will see me. And I have taken my false or true contract to flash in the faces of various people that called me washed up. All right, that's the deal.

  Tomorrow you'll get the car back and what's left of your money. Tonight's all that counts.

  PRINCESS: How do you know that as soon as you walk out of this room I won't call the

  police?

  CHANCE: You wouldn't do that, Princess. [He puts on his jacket.] You'll find the car in back of the hotel parking lot, and the left-over dough will be in the glove compartment of the car.

  PRINCESS: Where will you be?

  CHANCE: With my girl, or nowhere.

  PRINCESS: Chance Wayne! This was not necessary, all this. I'm not a phony and I wanted to

  be your friend.

  CHANCE: Go back to sleep. As far as I know you're not a bad person, but you just got into bad company on this occasion.

  PRINCESS: I am your friend and I'm not a phony.

  [Chance turns and goes to the steps.]

  When will I see you?

  CHANCE [at the top of the steps]: I don't know--maybe never.

  PRINCESS: Never is a long time, Chance, I'll wait.

  [She throws him a kiss.]

  CHANCE: So long.

  [The Princess stands looking after him as the lights dim and the curtain closes.]

  Act Two

  SCENE ONE

  The terrace of Boss Finley's house, which is a frame house of Victorian Gothic design,

  suggested by a doorframe at the right and a single white column. As in the other scenes, there are no walls, the action occurring against the sky and sea cyclorama.

  The Gulf is suggested by the brightness and the gulls crying as in Act One. There is only

  essential porch furniture, Victorian wicker but painted bone white. The men should also be

  wearing white or off-white suits: the tableau is all blue and white, as strict as a canvas of Georgie O'Keefe's.

  [At the rise of the curtain, Boss Finley is standing in the center and George Scudder

  nearby.]

  BOSS FINLEY: Chance Wayne had my daughter when she was fifteen.

  SCUDDER: That young.

  BOSS: When she was fifteen he had her. Know how I know?

  Some flashlight photos were made of her, naked, on Diamond Key.

  SCUDDER: By Chance Wayne?

  BOSS: My little girl was fifteen, barely out of her childhood when--[calling offstage] Charles--

  [Charles

  enters]

  BOSS: Call Miss Heavenly--

  CHARLES [concurrently]: Miss Heavenly. Miss Heavenly. Your
daddy wants to see you.

  [Charles

  leaves.]

  BOSS [to Scudder]: By Chance Wayne? Who the hell else do you reckon? I seen them. He had

  them developed by some studio in Pass Christian that made more copies of them than Chance

  Wayne ordered and these photos were circulated. I seen them. That was when I first warned the son-of-a-bitch to git out of St Cloud. But he's back in St Cloud right now. I tell you--

  SCUDDER: Boss, let me make a suggestion. Call off this rally, I mean your appearance at it,

  and take it easy tonight. Go out on your boat, you and Heavenly take a short cruise on THE