For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary
Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love to face my dead at last and write this play – write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.
These twelve years, O Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light – into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!
Gene.
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Edmund
…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 the 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 on 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!
He grins wryly.
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death (153-4)!
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Jamie
To hell with repining! Fat Violet’s a good kid. Glad I stayed with her. Christian act. Cured her blues. Hell of a good time. You should have stuck with me, Kid. Taken your mind off your troubles. What’s the use coming home to get the blues over what can’t be helped. All over – finished now – not a hope!
He stops, his head nodding drunkenly, his eyes closing – then suddenly he looks up, his face hard, and quotes jeeringly.
“If I were hanged on the highest hill,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!
I know whose love would follow me still…(161)”
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Tyrone
Heavily.
I wish to God she’d go to bed so that I could, too.
Drowsily.
I’m dog tired. I can’t stay up all night like I used to. Getting old – old and finished.
With a bone-cracking yawn.
Can’t keep my eyes open. I think I’ll catch a few winks. Why don’t you do the same, Edmund? It’ll pass the time until she –
His voice trails off. His eyes close, his chin sags, and he begins to breathe heavily through his mouth. Edmund sits tensely. He hears something and jerks nervously forward in his chair, staring through the front parlor into the hall. He jumps up with a haunted, distracted expression. It seems for a second he is going to hide in the back parlor. Then he sits down again and waits, his eyes averted, his hands gripping the arms of his chair. Suddenly all five bulbs of the chandelier are turned on from a wall switch, and a moment later someone starts playing piano in there – the opening of one of Chopin’s simpler waltzes, done with a forgetful, stiff-fingered groping, as if an awkward schoolgirl were practicing it for the first time. Tyrone starts to wide-awakeness and sober dread, and Jamie’s head jerks back and his eyes open. For a moment they listen frozenly. The playing stops as abruptly as it began, and Mary appears in the doorway. She wears a sky-blue dressing gown over her nightdress, dainty slippers with pompons on her bare feet. Her face is paler than ever. Her eyes look enormous. They glisten like polished black jewels. The uncanny thing is that her face now appears so youthful. Experience seems ironed out of it. It is a marble mask for girlish innocence, the mouth caught in a shy smile. Her white hair is braided in two pigtails which hang over her breast. Over one arm, carried neglectfully, trailing on the floor, as if she had forgotten she held it, is an old-fashioned white satin wedding gown, trimmed with duchesse lace. She hesitates in the doorway, glancing around the room, her forehead puckered puzzledly, like someone who has come to a room to get something but has become absent-minded on the way and forgotten what it was. They stare at her. She seems aware of them merely as she is aware of other things in the room, the furniture, the windows, the familiar things she accepts automatically as naturally belonging there but which she is too preoccupied to notice.
Jamie
Breaks the cracking silence – bitterly, self-defensively sardonic.
The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!
His father and brother both turn on him fiercely. Edmund is quicker. He slaps Jamie across the mouth with the back of his hand (169-70).
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Tyrone
In a stifled voice.
What’s that she’s carrying, Edmund?
Edmund
Dully.
Her wedding gown, I suppose.
Tyrone
[ ]!
He gets to his feet and stands directly in her path – in anguish.
Mary! Isn’t it bad enough– ?
Controlling himself, gently persuasive.
Here, let me take it dear. You’ll only step on it and tear it and get it dirty dragging it on the floor. Then you’d be sorry afterwards.
She lets him take it, regarding him from somewhere far away within herself, without recognition, without either affection or animosity (171-2).
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Mary
…That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.
She stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie remain motionless (176).
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