Sweet Bird of Youth Read online

  STARFISH

  BOSS: I'm not about to start sparing myself. Oh, I know, I'll have me a coronary and go like

  that. But not because Chance Wayne had the unbelievable gall to come back to St Cloud.

  [Calling

  offstage]

  Tom Junior!

  TOM JUNIOR [offstage]: Yes, sir!

  BOSS: Has he checked out yet?

  TOM JUNIOR [entering]: Hatcher says he called their room at the Royal Palms, and Chance

  Wayne answered the phone, and Hatcher says . . .

  BOSS: Hatcher says--who's Hatcher?

  TOM JUNIOR: Dan Hatcher.

  BOSS: I hate to expose my ignorance like this but the name Dan Hatcher has no more meaning

  to me than the name of Hatcher, which is none whatsoever.

  SCUDDER [quietly, deferentially]: Hatcher, Dan Hatcher, is the assistant manager of the Royal Palms Hotel, and the man that informed me this morning that Chance Wayne was back in St

  Cloud.

  BOSS: Is this Hatcher a talker, or can he keep his mouth shut?

  SCUDDER: I think I impressed him how important it is to handle this thing discreetly.

  BOSS: Discreetly, like you handled that operation you done on my daughter, so discreetly that a hillbilly heckler is shouting me questions about it wherever I speak?

  SCUDDER: I went to fantastic lengths to preserve the secrecy of that operation.

  TOM JUNIOR: When Papa's upset he hits out at anyone near him.

  BOSS: I just want to know--Has Wayne left?

  TOM JUNIOR: Hatcher says that Chance Wayne told him that this old movie star that he's

  latched on to . . .

  SCUDDER: Alexandra Del Lago.

  TOM JUNIOR: She's not well enough to travel.

  BOSS: Okay, you're a doctor, remove her to a hospital. Call an ambulance and haul her out of

  the Royal Palms Hotel.

  SCUDDER: Without her consent?

  BOSS: Say she's got something contagious, typhoid, bubonic plague. Haul her out and slap a

  quarantine oh her hospital door. That way you can separate them. We can remove Chance

  Wayne from St Cloud as soon as this Miss Del Lago is removed from Chance Wayne.

  SCUDDER: I'm not so sure that's the right way to go about it.

  BOSS: Okay, you think of a way. My daughter's no whore, but she had a whore's operation

  after the last time he had her. I don't want him passin' another night in St Cloud. Tom Junior.

  TOM JUNIOR: Yes, sir.

  BOSS: I want him gone by tomorrow--tomorrow commences at midnight.

  TOM JUNIOR: I know what to do, Papa. Can I use the boat?

  BOSS: Don't ask me, don't tell me nothin'--

  TOM JUNIOR: Can I have the Starfish tonight?

  BOSS: I don't want to know how, just go about it. Where's your sister?

  [Charles appears on the gallery, points out Heavenly lying on the beach to Boss and

  exits.]

  TOM JUNIOR: She's lyin' out on the beach like a dead body washed up on it.

  BOSS [calling]: Heavenly!

  TOM JUNIOR: Gawge, I want you with me on this boat trip tonight, Gawge.

  BOSS [calling]: Heavenly!

  SCUDDER: I know what you mean, Tom Junior, but I couldn't be involved in it. I can't even

  know about it.

  BOSS [calling again]: Heavenly!

  TOM JUNIOR: Okay, don't be involved in it. There's a pretty fair doctor that lost his license for helping a girl out of trouble, and he won't be so goddam finicky about doing this absolutely just thing.

  SCUDDER: I don't question the moral justification, which is complete without question. . . .

  TOM JUNIOR: Yeah, complete without question.

  SCUDDER: But I am a reputable doctor, I haven't lost my license. I'm chief of staff at the great hospital put up by your father. . . .

  TOM JUNIOR: I said, don't know about it.

  SCUDDER: No, sir, I won't know about it . . . [Boss starts to cough.] I can't afford to, and

  neither can your father. . . .

  [Scudder goes to gallery writing prescription.]

  BOSS: Heavenly! Come up here, sugar. [To Scudder]

  What's that you're writing?

  SCUDDER: Prescription for that cough.

  BOSS: Tear it up, throw it away. I've hawked and spit all my life, and I'll be hawking and

  spitting in the hereafter.

  You all can count on that.

  [Auto horn is heard.]

  TOM JUNIOR [leaps up on the gallery and starts to leave]: Papa, he's drivin' back by.

  BOSS: Tom Junior.

  [Tom

  Junior

  stops.]

  TOM JUNIOR: Is Chance Wayne insane?

  SCUDDER: Is a criminal degenerate sane or insane is a question that lots of law courts haven't been able to settle.

  BOSS: Take it to the Supreme Court, they'll hand you down a decision on that question. They'll tell you a handsome young criminal degenerate like Chance Wayne is the mental and moral

  equal of any white man in the country.

  TOM JUNIOR: He's stopped at the foot of the drive.

  BOSS: Don't move, don't move, Tom Junior.

  TOM JUNIOR: I'm not movin', Papa.

  CHANCE [offstage]: Aunt Nonnie! Hey, Aunt Nonnie!

  BOSS: What's he shouting?

  TOM JUNIOR: He's shouting at Aunt Nonnie.

  BOSS: Where is she?

  TOM JUNIOR: Runnin' up the drive like a dog-track rabbit.

  BOSS: He ain't following is he?

  TOM JUNIOR: Nope. He's drove away.

  [Aunt Nonnie appears before the veranda, terribly flustered, rooting in her purse for

  something, apparently blind to the men on the veranda,]

  BOSS: Whatcha lookin' for, Nonnie?

  NONNIE [stopping short]: Oh--I didn't notice you, Tom. I was looking for my door-key.

  BOSS: Door's open, Nonnie, it's wide open, like a church door.

  NONNIE [laughing]: Oh, ha, ha . . .

  BOSS: Why didn't you answer that good-lookin' boy in the Cadillac car that shouted at you,

  Nonnie?

  NONNIE: Oh. I hoped you hadn't seen him. [Draws a deep breath and comes on to the terrace, closing her white purse.]

  That was Chance Wayne. He's back in St Cloud, he's at the Royal Palms, he's--

  BOSS: Why did you snub him like that? After all these years of devotion?

  NONNIE: I went to the Royal Palms to warn him not to play here but--

  BOSS: He was out showing off in that big white Cadillac with the trumpet horns on it.

  NONNIE: I left a message for him, I--

  TOM JUNIOR: What was the message, Aunt Nonnie? Love and kisses?

  NONNIE: Just get out of St Cloud right away, Chance.

  TOM JUNIOR: He's gonna git out, but not in that fish-tail Caddy.

  NONNIE [to Tom Junior]: I hope you don't mean violence--[turning to Boss] does he, Tom?

  Violence don't solve problems. It never solves young people's problems. If you will leave it to me, I'll get him out of St Cloud. I can, I will, I promise. I don't think Heavenly knows he's back in St Cloud. Tom, you know, Heavenly says it wasn't Chance that--She says it wasn't Chance.

  BOSS: You're like your dead sister, Nonnie, gullible as my wife was. You don't know a lie if

  you bump into it on a street in the daytime. Now go out there and tell Heavenly I want to see her.

  NONNIE: Tom, she's not well enough to--

  BOSS: Nonnie, you got a whole lot to answer for.

  NONNIE: Have I?

  BOSS: Yes, you sure have, Nonnie. You favored Chance Wayne, encouraged, aided, and

  abetted him in his corruption of Heavenly over a long, long time. You go get her. You sure do have a lot to answer for. You got a helluva lot to answer for.

  NONNIE: I remember when Chance was the finest, nicest, sweetest boy in St Cloud, and he

  stayed that way till you,
till you--

  BOSS: Go get her, go get her!

  [She leaves by the far side of the terrace. After a moment her voice is heard calling,

  'Heavenly? Heavenly?']

  It's a curious thing, a mighty peculiar thing, how often a man that rises to high public

  office is drug back down by every soul he harbors under his roof. He harbors them under his

  roof, and they pull the roof down on him. Every last living one of them.

  TOM JUNIOR: Does that include me, Papa?

  BOSS: If the shoe fits, put it on you.

  TOM JUNIOR: How does that shoe fit me?

  BOSS: If it pinches your foot, just slit it down the sides a little--it'll feel comfortable on you.

  TOM JUNIOR: Papa, you are UNJUST.

  BOSS: What do you want credit for?

  TOM JUNIOR: I have devoted the past year to organizin' the 'Youth for Tom Finley' clubs.

  BOSS: I'm carryin' Tom Finley Junior on my ticket.

  TOM JUNIOR: You're lucky to have me on it.

  BOSS: How do you figure I'm lucky to have you on it?

  TOM JUNIOR: I got more newspaper coverage in the last six months than . . .

  BOSS: Once for drunk drivin', once for a stag party you thrown in Capitol City that cost me

  five thousand dollars to hush it up!

  TOM JUNIOR: You are so unjust, it . . .

  BOSS: And everyone knows you had to be drove through school like a blazeface mule pullin' a

  plough uphill: flunked out of college with grades that only a moron would have an excuse for.

  TOM JUNIOR: I got re-admitted to college.

  BOSS: At my insistence. By fake examinations, answers provided beforehand, stuck in your

  fancy pockets. And your promiscuity. Why, these 'Youth for Tom Finley' clubs are practically

  nothin' but gangs of juvenile delinquents, wearin' badges with my name and my photograph on

  them.

  TOM JUNIOR: How about your well-known promiscuity, Papa? How about your Miss Lucy?

  BOSS: Who is Miss Lucy?

  TOM JUNIOR [laughing so hard he staggers]: Who is Miss Lucy? You don't even know who she is, this woman you keep in a fifty-dollar-a-day hotel suite at the Royal Palms, Papa?

  BOSS: What're you talkin' about?

  TOM JUNIOR: That rides down the Gulf Stream Highway with a motor-cycle escort blowin'

  their sirens like the Queen of Sheba was going into New Orleans for the day. To use her charge accounts there. And you ask who's Miss Lucy? She don't even talk good of you. She says you're too old for a lover.

  BOSS: That is a goddam lie. Who says Miss Lucy says that?

  TOM JUNIOR: She wrote it with lipstick on the ladies' room mirror at the Royal Palms.

  BOSS: Wrote what?

  TOM JUNIOR: I'll quote it to you exactly. 'Boss Finley,' she wrote, 'is too old to cut the

  mustard.'

  [Pause: the two stags, the old and the young one, face each other, panting, Scudder has

  discreetly withdrawn to a far end of porch.]

  BOSS: I don't believe this story!

  TOM JUNIOR: Don't believe it.

  BOSS: I will check on it, however.

  TOM JUNIOR: I already checked on it. Papa, why don't you get rid of her, huh, Papa?

  [Boss Finley turns away, wounded, baffled: stares out at the audience with his old,

  bloodshot eyes as if he thought that someone out there had shouted a question at him which he didn't quite hear.]

  BOSS: Mind your own goddam business. A man with a mission, which he holds sacred, and on

  the strength of which he rises to high public office--crucified in this way, publicly, by his own offspring,

  [Heavenly has entered on the gallery.]

  Ah, here she is, here's my little girl. [Stopping Heavenly] You stay here, honey. I think

  you all had better leave me alone with Heavenly now, huh--yeah. . . .

  Tom Junior and Scudder exit.]

  Now, honey, you stay here. I want to have a talk with you.

  HEAVENLY: Papa, I can't talk now.

  BOSS: It's necessary.

  HEAVENLY: I can't, I can't talk now.

  BOSS: All right, don't talk, just listen.

  [But she doesn't want to listen, starts away. He would have restrained her forcibly if an

  old colored manservant, Charles, had not, at that moment, come out on the porch. He carries a stick, a hat, a package, wrapped as a present. Puts them on a table.]

  CHARLES: It's five o'clock, Mister Finley.

  BOSS: Huh? Oh--thanks . . .

  [Charles turns on a coach lamp by the door. This marks a formal division in the scene.

  The light change is not realistic; the light doesn't seem to come from the coach lamp but from a spectral radiance in the sky, flooding the terrace.

  The sea wind sings, Heavenly lifts her face to it. Later that night may be stormy, but

  now there is just a quickness and freshness coming in from the Gulf. Heavenly is always

  looking that way, towards the Gulf, so that the light from Point Lookout catches her face with its repeated soft stroke of clarity.

  In her father, a sudden dignity is revived. Looking at his very beautiful daughter, he

  becomes almost stately. He approaches her, as soon as the colored man returns inside, like an aged courtier comes deferentially up to a Crown Princess or Infanta. It's important not to think of his attitude towards her in the terms of crudely conscious incestuous feeling, but just in the natural terms of almost any aging father's feeling for a beautiful young daughter who reminds him of a dead wife that he desired intensely when she was the age of his daughter.

  At this point there might be a phrase of stately, Mozartian music, suggesting a court

  dance. The flagged terrace may suggest the parquet floor of a ballroom and the two players'

  movements may suggest the stately, formal movements of a court dance of that time; but if this effect is used, it should be just a suggestion. The change towards 'stylization' ought to be held in check.]

  BOSS: You're still a beautiful girl.

  HEAVENLY: Am I, Papa?

  BOSS: Of course you are. Lookin' at you nobody could guess that--

  HEAVENLY [laughs]: The embalmers must have done a good job on me, Papa. . . .

  BOSS: You got to quit talkin' like that.

  [Then,

  seeing

  Charles]

  Will

  you get back in the house!

  [Phone

  rings.]

  CHARLES: Yes, sir, I was just--

  BOSS: Go on in! If that phone-call is for me, I'm in only to the governor of the state and the president of the Tidewater Oil Corporation.

  CHARLES [offstage]: It's for Miss Heavenly again.

  BOSS: Say she ain't in.

  CHARLES: Sorry, she ain't in.

  [Heavenly has moved upstage to the low parapet or sea wall that separates the courtyard

  and lawn from the beach. It is early dusk. The coach lamp has cast a strange light on the setting which is neo-romantic; Heavenly stops by an ornamental urn containing a tall fern that the salty Gulf wind has stripped nearly bare. The Boss follows her, baffled.]

  BOSS: Honey, you say and do things in the presence of people as if you had no regard of the

  fact that people have ears to hear you and tongues to repeat what they hear. And so you become a issue.

  HEAVENLY: Become what, Papa?

  BOSS: A issue, a issue, subject of talk, of scandal--which can defeat the mission that--

  HEAVENLY: Don't give me your 'Voice of God' speech. Papa, there was a time when you

  could have saved me, by letting me marry a boy that was still young and clean, but instead you drove him away, drove him out of St Cloud. And when he came back, you took me out of St

  Cloud, and tried to force me to marry a fifty-year-old money bag that you wanted something

  out of--