Long Day's Journey into Night (Yale Nota Bene) (20 page)

With a loose-mouthed sneer of self-contempt.

But, of course, that was in barrooms, when I was full of whiskey. I can’t feel that way about it when I’m sober in my home. It was at home I first learned the value of a dollar and the fear of the poorhouse. I’ve never been able to believe in my luck since. I’ve always feared it would change and everything I had would be taken away. But still, the more property you own, the safer you think you are. That may not be logical, but it’s the way I have to feel. Banks fail, and your money’s gone, but you think you can keep land beneath your feet.

Abruptly his tone becomes scornfully superior.

You said you realized what I’d been up against as a boy. The hell you do! How could you? You’ve had everything—nurses, schools, college, though you didn’t stay there. You’ve had food, clothing. Oh, I know you had a fling of hard work with your back and hands, a bit of being homeless and penniless in a foreign land, and I respect you for it. But it was a game of romance and adventure to you. It was play.

Dully sarcastic.

Yes, particularly the time I tried to commit suicide at Jimmie the Priest’s, and almost did.

You weren’t in your right mind. No son of mine would ever— You were drunk.

I was stone cold sober. That was the trouble. I’d stopped to think too long.

With drunken peevishness.

Don’t start your damned atheist morbidness again! I don’t care to listen. I was trying to make plain to you—

Scornfully.

What do you know of the value of a dollar? When I was ten my father deserted my mother and went back to Ireland to die. Which he did soon enough, and deserved to, and I hope he’s roasting in hell. He mistook rat poison for flour, or sugar, or something. There was gossip it wasn’t by mistake but that’s a lie. No one in my family ever—

My bet is, it wasn’t by mistake.

More morbidness! Your brother put that in your head. The worst he can suspect is the only truth for him. But never mind. My mother was left, a stranger in a strange land, with four small children, me and a sister a little older and two younger than me. My two older brothers had moved to other parts. They couldn’t help. They were hard put to it to keep themselves alive. There was no damned romance in our poverty. Twice we were evicted from the miserable hovel we called home, with my mother’s few sticks of furniture thrown out in the street, and my mother and sisters crying. I cried, too, though I tried hard not to, because I was the man of the family. At ten years old! There was no more school for me. I worked twelve hours a day in a machine shop, learning to make files. A dirty barn of a place where rain dripped through the roof, where you roasted in summer, and there was no stove in winter, and your hands got numb with cold, where the only light came through two small filthy windows, so on grey days I’d have to sit bent over with my eyes almost touching the files in order to see! You talk of work! And what do you think I got for it? Fifty cents a week! It’s the truth! Fifty cents a week! And my poor mother washed and scrubbed for the Yanks by the day, and my older sister sewed, and my two younger stayed at home to keep the house. We never had clothes enough to wear, nor enough food to eat. Well I remember one Thanksgiving, or maybe it was Christmas, when some Yank in whose house mother had been scrubbing gave her a dollar extra for a present, and on the way home she spent it all on food. I can remember her hugging and kissing us and saying with tears of joy running down her tired face: “Glory be to God, for once in our lives we’ll have enough for each of us!”

He wipes tears from his eyes.

A fine, brave, sweet woman. There never was a braver or finer.

Moved.

Yes, she must have been.

Her one fear was she’d get old and sick and have to die in the poorhouse.

He pauses—then adds with grim humor.

It was in those days I learned to be a miser. A dollar was worth so much then. And once you’ve learned a lesson, it’s hard to unlearn it. You have to look for bargains. If I took this state farm sanatorium for a good bargain, you’ll have to forgive me. The doctors did tell me it’s a good place. You must believe that, Edmund. And I swear I never meant you to go there if you didn’t want to.

Vehemently.

You can choose any place you like! Never mind what it costs! Any place I can afford. Any place you like—within reason.

At this qualification, a grin twitches Edmunds lips. His resentment has gone. His father goes on with an elaborately offhand, casual air.

There was another sanatorium the specialist recommended. He said it had a record as good as any place in the country. It’s endowed by a group of millionaire factory owners, for the benefit of their workers principally, but you’re eligible to go there because you’re a resident. There’s such a pile of money behind it, they don’t have to charge much. It’s only seven dollars a week but you get ten times that value.

Hastily.

I don’t want to persuade you to anything, understand. I’m simply repeating what I was told.

Concealing his smile—casually.

Oh, I know that. It sounds like a good bargain to me. I’d like to go there. So that settles that.

Abruptly he is miserably desperate again—dully.

It doesn’t matter a damn now, anyway. Let’s forget it!

Changing the subject.

How about our game? Whose play is it?

Mechanically.

I don’t know. Mine, I guess. No, it’s yours.

Edmund plays a card. His father takes it. Then about to play from his hand, he again forgets the game.

Yes, maybe life overdid the lesson for me, and made a dollar worth too much, and the time came when that mistake ruined my career as a fine actor.

Sadly.

I’ve never admitted this to anyone before, lad, but tonight I’m so heartsick I feel at the end of everything, and what’s the use of fake pride and pretense. That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in—a great money success—it ruined me with its promise of an easy fortune. I didn’t want to do anything else, and by the time I woke up to the fact I’d become a slave to the damned thing and did try other plays, it was too late. They had identified me with that one part, and didn’t want me in anything else. They were right, too. I’d lost the great talent I once had through years of easy repetition, never learning a new part, never really working hard. Thirty-five to forty thousand dollars net profit a season like snapping your fingers! It was too great a temptation. Yet before I bought the damned thing I was considered one of the three or four young actors with the greatest artistic promise in America. I’d worked like hell. I’d left a good job as a machinist to take supers’ parts because I loved the theater. I was wild with ambition. I read all the plays ever written. I studied Shakespeare as you’d study the Bible. I educated myself. I got rid of an Irish brogue you could cut with a knife. I loved Shakespeare. I would have acted in any of his plays for nothing, for the joy of being alive in his great poetry. And I acted well in him. I felt inspired by him. I could have been a great Shakespearean actor, if I’d kept on. I know that! In 1874 when Edwin Booth came to the theater in Chicago where I was leading man, I played Cassius to his Brutus one night, Brutus to his Cassius the next, Othello to his Iago, and so on. The first night I played Othello, he said to our manager, “That young man is playing Othello better than I ever did!”

Proudly.

That from Booth, the greatest actor of his day or any other! And it was true! And I was only twenty-seven years old! As I look back on it now, that night was the high spot in my career. I had life where I wanted it! And for a time after that I kept on upward with ambition high. Married your mother. Ask her what I was like in those days. Her love was an added incentive to ambition. But a few years later my good bad luck made me find the big money-maker. It wasn’t that in my eyes at first. It was a great romantic part I knew I could play better than anyone. But it was a great box office success from the start—and then life had me where it wanted me—at from thirty-five to forty thousand net profit a season! A fortune in those days—or even in these.

Bitterly.

What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth— Well, no matter. It’s a late day for regrets.

He glances vaguely at his cards.

My play, isn’t it?

Moved, stares at his father with understanding—slowly.

I’m glad you’ve told me this, Papa. I know you a lot better now.

With a loose, twisted smile.

Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. Maybe you’ll only feel more contempt for me. And it’s a poor way to convince you of the value of a dollar.

Then as if this phrase automatically aroused an habitual association in his mind, he glances up at the chandelier disapprovingly.

The glare from those extra lights hurts my eyes. You don’t mind if I turn them out, do you? We don’t need them, and there’s no use making the Electric Company rich.

Controlling a wild impulse to laugh—agreeably.

No, sure not. Turn them out.

Gets heavily and a bit waveringly to his feet and gropes uncertainly for the lights—his mind going back to its line of thought.

No, I don’t know what the hell it was I wanted to buy.

He clicks out one bulb.

On my solemn oath, Edmund, I’d gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank—

He clicks out another bulb.

I’d be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.

He turns out the third bulb, so only the reading lamp is on, and sits down again heavily. Edmund suddenly cannot hold back a burst of strained, ironical laughter. Tyrone is hurt.

What the devil are you laughing at?

Not at you, Papa. At life. It’s so damned crazy.

Growls.

More of your morbidness! There’s nothing wrong with life. It’s we who—

He quotes.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.”

He pauses—then sadly.

The praise Edwin Booth gave my Othello. I made the manager put down his exact words in writing. I kept it in my wallet for years. I used to read it every once in a while until finally it made me feel so bad I didn’t want to face it any more. Where is it now, I wonder? Somewhere in this house. I remember I put it away carefully—

With a wry ironical sadness.

It might be in an old trunk in the attic, along with Mama’s wedding dress.

Then as his father stares at him, he adds quickly.

For Pete’s sake, if we’re going to play cards, let’s play.

He takes the card his father had played and leads. For a moment, they play the game, like mechanical chess players. Then Tyrone stops, listening to a sound upstairs.

She’s still moving around. God knows when she’ll go to sleep.

Pleads tensely.

For Christ’s sake, Papa, forget it!

He reaches out and pours a drink. Tyrone starts to protest, then gives it up. Edmund drinks. He puts down the glass. His expression changes. When he speaks it is as if he were deliberately giving way to drunkenness and seeking to hide behind a maudlin manner.

Yes, she moves above and beyond us, a ghost haunting the past, and here we sit pretending to forget, but straining our ears listening for the slightest sound, hearing the fog drip from the eaves like the uneven tick of a rundown, crazy clock—or like the dreary tears of a trollop spattering in a puddle of stale beer on a honky-tonk table top!

He laughs with maudlin appreciation.

Not so bad, that last, eh? Original, not Baudelaire. Give me credit!

Then with alcoholic talkativeness.

You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They’re all connected with the sea. Here’s one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow’s nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!