Some Wildflower In My Heart (15 page)

The program that we attended that September evening was staged in a small theater known as the Factory Floor, located in what had once been a leading textile factory in Greenville. Although the building itself was enormous, the factory had ceased production in the early sixties, the owners claiming that there was no room for expansion at the present site.

Several enterprising businessmen had subsequently purchased the vacated factory and transformed it into a so-called “art and trades center,” which they named Marva-Loom Marketplace, Marva-Loom being the name of the original textile factory. Besides a host of upscale specialty shops, the Marva-Loom Marketplace houses the Candy Corner, an art gallery called the Signet Studio, the Yogurt Yacht, and, as I said, the Factory Floor, the theater where a troupe of aspiring young dramatists take to the stage.

The director of the Factory Floor, an outspoken woman named Ramona Hull Chadwick, has during her tenure been touted as “a gutsy crusader of the avant-garde” and has received great publicity throughout the Southeast for her use of the stage to “proclaim unorthodoxy”—an unpopular activity among the large conservative element in this region—and to champion the causes of minorities. I read an interview of Miss Chadwick recently in which she was quoted as saying, “Rich, educated, elitist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males are the scourge of society.” Some of the wind is taken out of this statement, however, when one considers the fact that Ramona Hull Chadwick herself is a rich, educated, elitist, white Anglo-Saxon female.

“Did you say you've seen these plays?” Joan asked after we had found our seats.

“No, I have read two of them,” I replied. “Reading a play on the printed page and seeing it performed are two different experiences, however.”

“You can say that again,” Joan said. “Did you go with me that time over to Spartanburg to see
Hamlet
?”

“No,” I replied.

“That's right. I went with this man from work. How could I have forgotten? Dumbest thing I've ever done. The guy wore a
toupee
. Anyway, I must have studied
Hamlet
at least a dozen times in different classes, but I'd never seen it. So this man asks me to go with him, right? And it was like I'd never even heard this story before! They decided to be real creative and change the setting to a South Pacific island. What a hoot! Everybody in the cast wore Polynesian garb and ate pineapples and coconuts. When Hamlet told Ophelia to ‘get thee to a nunnery,' I laughed right out loud all by myself. There she was, wearing a grass skirt and a lei and being told to go to a
nunnery
. Where do you suppose the nearest one of those was? Bora Bora?”

Without turning to face her, I saw Joan shake her head and then open her purse, rummage through it, and at last remove a piece of Doublemint chewing gum. As I wondered whether she had written a review of
Hamlet
that night and, if so, whether her sarcasm had been veiled or blatant, I saw that she was unwrapping the gum and folding it into her mouth.

I could not recollect ever having seen Joan chew gum before, and it struck me then that her behavior this evening was out of the ordinary in a number of respects. She had arrived ten minutes late to pick me up, though I knew well her preference for claiming her seats for a performance at least twenty minutes in advance and preferably thirty; she had talked far more than usual on the trip into Greenville, much of what she said being disconnected and incomplete; she had missed the turn to the Marva-Loom Marketplace and had taken an inefficient detour through several winding residential streets; and now she was masticating a stick of gum as if she had a vast surplus of nervous energy.

You would not call Joan “pretty” if you passed her on the street. You would, however, immediately perceive an expression of intelligent skepticism in her dark blue eyes. If you were to spend an afternoon with her, no doubt her physical appearance would steadily improve to the point that you might describe her as “arresting” or speak of her “mystique.” Her widely spaced eyes, which she often closes in thought, the patina of her fine dark hair, her habit of smiling with only half of her mouth (the right side), and her tasteful but unstudied manner of dress combine to produce an aura of detachment and nonchalance, which I believe generally attracts the interest of others.

On this night Joan wore a dark green dress of raw silk and a single strand of pearls. As she opened the stenographer's pad she always carries with her on occasions such as this, she asked me, “So which two have you read?”

“
Trifles
and
The Twelve-Pound Look
,” I replied. Though I believe that my company is not onerous to Joan, I also understand that she values my extensive knowledge of literature and places confidence in my assessment of a given performance. I admit to feelings of gratification upon reading her newspaper reviews, not only because I think highly of Joan but also because I recognize in what she has written certain phrases of my own invention.

“I looked all three of them up at the library last week and read them,” Joan said. “I was surprised at how tame they are. From what I can tell, tonight's going to be pretty unusual for the daring Ramona.”

“Yes,” I replied.

Joan's energetic and unprecedented gum chewing produced a distinct snap. As if I did not understand, she continued. “You know what I mean. She normally uses such way-out stuff that everybody pretty much equates the Factory Floor with weirdness as far as drama goes.”

I nodded. In the past three years Ramona Hull Chadwick had directed performances of classic absurdist drama such as Elmer Rice's
The Adding Machine
, in which the main character is a cipher named Mr. Zero, and Eugene Ionesco's
The Chairs
, which tracks a couple's unsuccessful search for the meaning of life as they exchange aimless dialogue in a castle in the middle of an ocean.

I glanced to the rows behind us and saw that the theater appeared to be filled to capacity. My watch revealed that the performance should begin in one minute.

“So we can safely say that these three plays have a pretty strong feminist agenda, right?” asked Joan, uncapping her pen.

“Undoubtedly strong,” I said, “though admirably subtle.” I went on to comment on the wisdom of Miss Chadwick in including the work of a male playwright in her trilogy, for J. M. Barrie, whose name is so fondly linked with such beloved books as
Peter Pan
and
The Little Minister
, also wrote the play
The Twelve-Pound Look
.

The lights were dimming as Joan whispered, “It's interesting how the play that's from the furthest back is really the newest.” Joan's spoken words are often characterized by a lack of clarity, although her writing is quite lucid and precise. I understood her meaning, however.
The Man in a Case
, though set in the late 1800s—and based, incidentally, upon a story by Anton Chekhov—was published quite recently, in 1986, whereas the other two plays were both set and published, I believe, during the first half of the twentieth century.

The actors and actresses were capable, the costumes appropriate, and the sets adequate though not elaborate. As these were all one-act works, there were scene changes only between plays, during which time many members of the audience took a brief leave from the theater to the Yogurt Yacht next door. The man seated next to me returned after the first intermission with a large, damp stain on his light blue necktie.

The three plays—
The Man in a Case, The Twelve-Pound Look
, and
Trifles
—were set, respectively, in an outdoor park, an elegant English parlor, and the kitchen of a midwestern farmhouse, and for their speedy transformation of the stage between plays, the stage crew earned a word of commendation in Joan's review.

Briefly, Wendy Wasserstein's
The Man in a Case
presented a brisk scene between an impetuous young Russian girl and the dignified schoolmaster to whom she is betrothed. Miss Chadwick's interpretation of the work made the schoolmaster out to be even more of a dolt, in my opinion, than the script suggests. For my part, I feel that the girl in the story is not the only one to benefit from the termination of the engagement.

As the schoolmaster tore up the note in the closing moments of the play, thus implying that the relationship had ended, I was relieved that he had extricated himself in a timely fashion from what was destined to be a miserable union. I sympathized with the man—something I rarely do in works of literature—as I contemplated the intrusion of such a flighty, undisciplined girl upon his well-ordered life. Furthermore, I felt that his character had been misrepresented in the drama, that he had been made a caricature, while the girl had been granted undeserved favor simply for being gaily youthful.

The Twelve-Pound Look
impressed me as adhering faithfully to the playwright's intent. I believe that J. M. Barrie meant to evoke scorn and contempt for the arrogant, heavy-handed husband who had driven away his first wife and was clearly in the process of doing the same with his second.

Susan Glaspell's play
Trifles
was, in my opinion, the strongest work performed that night, the title summarizing ironic truths: that small acts can lead to tumult, that what seems to be a mere triviality may hold the key to a great mystery, that while the slenderest thread of hope is often enough to sustain life, the snapping of that thread can wreak sudden and total destruction. The play examines what can happen when a lonely woman lives with a hard man. It explores on a very human level the struggle between emotion and reason, between compassion and duty, between love and law. Though afterward I heatedly stated to Joan my objections to the conclusion that grows out of this play, I acknowledge the truth that when the human soul is wrung dry of hope, normal standards of decency are often abandoned. I do not say that this is right; I say that it is so. I know a great deal about hopelessness.

At the Second Cup Coffee Shoppe, where Joan ordered espresso and I a cup of hot raspberry tea, we exchanged our opinions of the three plays. She removed her chewing gum from her mouth and set it on a paper napkin, which she then wadded into a ball. As we talked, Joan wrote copiously in her stenographer's pad, expanding the notes she had taken during the program, striking through certain lines, drawing arrows, and at one point even rotating her pad as she wrote around the perimeter of a page. From time to time she tidied her bangs, starting at her left temple and running a forefinger in an arc across her brow and down to her right temple. It is a mindless habit that she performs often, and it is a wonder that her finger has not worn a curved groove into her forehead. At last she looked at her watch and slid out of the booth. I followed.

As we started home, I noted that Joan seemed less edgy than earlier. No doubt the plays had taken her mind off whatever had been troubling her. We traveled in silence for several minutes after leaving Greenville. It was a dark night, I recall, with a waxing moon of butter yellow. That night it was “just a big old lopsided beach ball,” as Thomas describes the stage just prior to its reaching maximum fullness.

Suddenly, Joan blurted out a most amazing question, one for which I was totally unprepared. I must clarify that before this point she had never trespassed into my personal life, nor I into hers. Though I knew sketchy details of her family background, she knew almost nothing of mine except that I had married her cousin more than fifteen years ago.

“What do you think of men in general, Margaret?” That was her question. I was stunned.

In the silence that followed, I quickly considered why she might ask me such a question. Hoping that it was merely a stray thought resulting from the three plays that we had attended that evening, I framed a cautious, oblique response. “As we agreed earlier, I believe the three plays can be seen as a collective statement that men often undervalue women.”

She lifted one hand from the steering wheel in a weary gesture. “Oh, I know
that
,” she said, “but I'm talking about the men
you
know. Do you have faith in them? Or can you really have faith in anybody these days? Is marriage just the ultimate gamble, or is there some way to know if it's going to hold up? I keep thinking of all the men in history, all the way from Adam—if there ever really was such a man—on through the pharaohs of Egypt and the Greek philosophers and the Roman generals and the pilgrim fathers and the explorers and inventors and log-cabin politicians and all the rest. Were any of them really
great men
of history? Or forget the history part—were they as great in private as everybody thought they were in public?”

A line from
Montana 1948
, a novel by Larry Watson and the winner of the 1993 Milkweed National Fiction Prize, sprang to my mind, and I spoke it aloud. “‘I find history endlessly amusing.'”

She replied immediately. “Why's that?”

I went on to paraphrase the narrator of Mr. Watson's story. “No one ever knows the true story of a man's life. Behind the records of public history lies a dung heap of shameful, private deeds.”

Joan's low, breathy laugh gave no evidence of amusement. “I guess that answers my question. So you think those men in history weren't great at all?” With hardly a pause she continued. “And are you making a blanket statement about all men?”

“Because of his physical power and rampant ego, a man is predisposed to violate the trust of helpless, dependent women. And I am not using the noun
man
in a generic sense to include all of humankind. I am speaking of the male of our species.” The caustic nature of my reply must have shocked Joan, for I saw that she glanced at me sharply.

Neither of us spoke again for a full minute. I did not want to talk further, wishing already that I had responded with less venom. Joan seemed wary of questioning me more, but at last she said quietly, “I hope you're not saying that Thomas mistreats you, Margaret.”