Pity Him Afterwards

She went away to the box office right after lunch. And the madman had to stay with the rest, had to go into the rehearsal room with them and go through a reading of the play. And then the male members of the cast were taken away by Arnie Kapow to work in the theater. They spent the next seven hours lowering backdrops from the flies, looking at them, taking them down and rolling them and putting them away at the back of the stage, moving them back and forth from one spot in the flies to another, bringing more up from the storage space under the stage. The madman and Perry Kent worked up in the fly loft, raising and lowering the drops, tying them off and reweighting the carriages. It was hot cramped work, heavy work, and the madman lost himself in the labor. For those hours up in the fly loft he was almost happy; a free human being, working his body as it was meant to be worked, stretching his muscles, straining at the ropes, and working in silent comradeship with other men. At the infrequent breaks, when he and Perry climbed down to the stage to sit with the others and smoke a cigarette, he was at peace. He forgot to be wary, forgot to be afraid. They talked together, and laughed together, and he joined with them and felt himself a part of them.

This was his true self. Not that beast forced to murder an old man and an old woman. How he’d hated that! How he hated the world that had made it necessary.

If only the whole world could be like this. Men working together in harmony, without suspicion, without fear. Without cruelty.

He hoped he would never be forced to kill any of these men. He hoped it with all his heart.

It was one in the morning when they finally stopped work, and they all trooped back to the house for a late snack in the kitchen before going to bed. The madman felt a delicious exhaustion, a comfortable drowsiness. The kitchen was bright and warm; the faces around him were happy and tired.

How good this was! He nearly wept at the beauty of it.

He was so tired, when at last they all went upstairs to their beds, that he didn’t even think of Cissie Walker. He just went into his room and undressed and crawled between clean sheets and fell immediately asleep.

Thursday morning, the mood of the night before was still with him. He reveled in the comradeship of the breakfast table, the automatic way in which the others accepted him as one of them. He glanced at Cissie Walker and was pleased by her, but only as a pleasant member of this pleasant company. The hunger of yesterday afternoon had disappeared completely.

It came back slowly during the day. In the morning, the men worked with Arnie Kapow, carrying flats out back for the girls to wash. For now, they were only concerned with the flats for the first week’s set. They carried out the flats Arnie selected, and then they went back to the stage to lay the ground-cloth and to fly the cyclorama. While the work was being done on the cyc, the madman was up in the fly loft with Perry again. Looking down through the ropes at the stage, he saw Mary Ann McKendrick moving around down there, checking the furniture list with Arnie. And Cissie Walker brought them coffee twice. She was the only girl in blouse and skirt; the others all wore blue jeans. Looking down at the stage from the fly loft, the madman watched Mary Ann McKendrick and Cissie Walker, and the hunger began again, building slowly.

And it built more after lunch. Ralph Schoen started the first rehearsal then. He didn’t need Linda and Karen, so they went back to work for Arnie some more, but he did need all the men.

Ralph gave them copies of the play, the acting version published by Samuel French. Then, while the rest of them just sat around, Ralph concentrated on the opening scene between Loueen Campbell and Richard Lane.

Loueen Campbell was playing the merry widow, a sophisticated nymphomaniac with a gift for smug repartee. Even in this first rehearsal, reading from the playbook, she was working at getting the character across. She was wearing a white blouse and black slacks, and her body was solid-looking, heavily girdled. Her hard and somewhat bitter face suited the character she was playing, adding just the slightest touch of coarseness to the widow’s sensuality.

The madman watched. He stared at her, and the imaginings began to build up again, with this time yet another leading lady, and he fabricated ways to get her alone. His mind invented entire sequences of lust with Loueen Campbell, in all of which she was, if anything, even more eager than he.

Late in the afternoon he had to answer a call of nature which was distracting him from his daydreams. There was no bathroom on the first floor, so he went upstairs, and on the way back down he met Cissie Walker coming up.

“Hi, there,” she said. She smiled. “How’s it going with mean ol’ Ralph?”