Read The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays Online
Authors: Tennessee Williams
The curtain rises upon an empty living room with a staircase that ascends to a landing where it proceeds in another direction to an unseen story above
.
It is a living room that has been lived in by at least two generations. The standing floor lamp with its faded silk shade, dingily fringed, establishes the period in which the room was first furnished for living
.
A mantle clock ticks rather loudly for half a minute before there is the sound of persons about to enter the house: the sounds are not vocal but mechanical. An old dog is roused from slumber by these sounds and approaches the door. It swings open to admit Cornelius and Bella McCorkle. They are a middle-class, late-middle-aged couple. He is thin with wispy hairs. She is clumsily gone to fat with an apologetic air; they are very used to each other, with the usual attritions of feelings
.
Cornelius sets down the luggage with an exhausted grunt and an indignant glance at Bella whose cardiac asthma has incapacitated her for carrying anything much beside her excess weight. She appears to be dazed until approached by the old dog who licks at her hand
.
CORNELIUS
: Come on Bella before it starts raining again.
BELLA
[
to the dog
]: Hello, Sweet Boy. Want out in the yard?
CORNELIUS
[
exhaustedly
]: He oughta stay out in the yard. I been tellin’ you for years that dog is a yard dog, Bella, he’s full of ticks and fleas, infests the furniture with ’em.
BELLA
[
also exhausted
]: Sweet Boy is been with us for years. He’s family to me.
CORNELIUS
: All right, if you want to claim relations with a flea-bitten ole mongrel, you do that. But I’ll be damned if I’ll acknowledge him as an in-law if you do.
BELLA
[
sniffling
]: This is no kind of conversation to have when we just git back from Memphis where we buried our first-born child.
CORNELIUS
[
softening with exhaustion or possibly even pity
]: Bella, the dog is at the door to go out like you sensibly suggested, so
why don’t you let him go do it? [
Bella lets Sweet Boy out
.] Now shut the door, a sharp wind’s blowin’ in, not good for arthritis. What’s the diff’rence between osteo-arthritis, as the Memphis specialist called it, and regular arthritis? I ast him. He didn’t explain.
BELLA
: Maybe age was the only explanation. It’s started rainin’ again. He’ll want back in as soon as he’s done his business in the yard.
CORNELIUS
: Smells to me like he’s made some business transactions in the house.
BELLA
: On the papers I spread out beside his feed-bowl in the kitchen.
CORNELIUS
: The stink of it makes me sick. [
Cornelius crosses off by swinging upstage door to kitchen. Bella gasps slightly as she notices a muddy pair of boots by the fireplace
.]
BELLA
: Cornelius!
CORNELIUS
[
returning from kitchen with can of beer
]: Now what?
BELLA
: Look at what’s by the fireplace! Charlie’s boots; he’s back!
CORNELIUS
: Been fired again, I guess.
BELLA
: This late he must be asleep. I’ll call him but not loud. [
Goes panting up to landing and calls softly
.] Charlie? Charlie?
CORNELIUS
: Bella, you’ve been warned to move slow. Now you run up those stairs like a mountain goat.
CHARLIE’S VOICE ABOVE
:
—Yeh
, Mom, are you back?
CORNELIUS
: Hears you call him and asks if you are back.
BELLA
: Sweetheart, come down here, baby!
[
Two voices, one male and one female, are heard above
.]
CORNELIUS
: He’s got him a woman up there, brought some hooker here with him.
BELLA
: Cornelius, be nice, he didn’t expect us this early.
CORNELIUS
: This early is late, twelve twenty-five.
[
After a slight pause their younger son Charlie, about twenty-five, appears on the landing in shorts
.]
BELLA
: Baby, baby, seen your boots by the fire, I knew you were home! [
She embraces him, sobbing
.]
CORNELIUS
: What’s detaining your lady-friend upstairs?
CHARLIE
[
detaching himself from Bella
]:
—Aw
, yeh, her, Stacey, my steady from Yazoo City. Come down an’ meet my folks.
STACEY
[
from above
]: Just a minute, hon.
CORNELIUS
: Gettin’ into her clo’se?
CHARLIE
: Both of us was so tired we went straight to bed.
CORNELIUS
: I bet.
CHARLIE
: How was the funeral, Mom? Did it go off all right?
CORNELIUS
: Yeh, perfect. Grave dug. Body interred.
BELLA
: We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I can’t discuss it tonight.
—You
all had supper? Want me to fix you some food? How about an om’lette? Haven’t checked the ice-box but think there’s eggs.
CORNELIUS
: Still calls the fridge an ice-box.
CHARLIE
: That would be wonderful, Mom.
BELLA
[
crossing upstage to kitchen door
]: With cheese and tomatoes an’ bacon. [
She exits to kitchen
.]
CORNELIUS
: So you lost another job, huh?
CHARLIE
: That job was misrepresented to me completely.
CORNELIUS
: You mean you found out it involved some work?
CHARLIE
: I don’t object to work.
CORNELIUS
: As long as you don’t have to do it.
CHARLIE
:
—Y’look
tired, Pop. How’re you feeling?
CORNELIUS
: Tired.
[
Stacey, Charlie’s girl, appears on the landing, silently, unnoticed. She is obviously pregnant but her face has a childish appeal. She appears to be still engaged in dressing. Charlie notices her and gives her a warning signal to remain out of sight till more completely appareled. Cornelius lumbers to easy chair and flops exhaustedly into it, massaging his belly, still oblivious of Stacey who has retreated into shadow on landing
.]
CHARLIE
[
with a nervous cough
]: You all had a long trip? Seem to be sorta done in.
CORNELIUS
: Wouldn’t think it possible you could spend six hours getting from here on the Gulf Coast up the river to Memphis but the actual flyin’ time was about two hours or one and a half and the rest was settin’ on our asses in the New Awleuns airport. [
Warming up
.] They announced three delays on that plane. Each time one was announced your Mom says, “Well, I reckon I’ll have some more coffee.”
CHARLIE
: That’s a good deal of coffee with her heart condition an’ pressure.
CORNELIUS
: It was less coffee than food. I looked through the window at her and the first time she had her a double-deck sandwich, the next time a couple of choc’late covered cupcakes. So when they announced the third delay I went to the lunch counter with her and she ordered a coffee and a sweet roll, but I said to the waitress, “Fawget the sweet roll.” The waitress ignored me, set down the sweet roll with the coffee. I said to the bitch, “Can you look at the size of this woman, the fat that she’s got on her, and set a sweet roll before her?” The bitch glared at me, and said, “I can since that’s what she ordered.” Well, I grabbed the sweet roll off the saucer and thrown it back of the counter. That’s when your Mom started cryin’ out loud, up till then it was just snifflin’ but then it turned to bawling. Public bawling. Embarrassed me so I wouldn’t set next to the woman. Blowin’ her nose? Sounded like a goose honkin’. “Cornelius, I run out of Kleenex, goin’ back an’ git me some paper napkins.” Pretended not to hear her but followed her to the lunch counter and sure enuff I was right. She got her another sweet roll with coffee.
—Another
sweet roll with coffee, impossible to believe it but she did, I seen it.
BELLA
[
calling out of kitchen
]: There’s seven eggs left. Cornelius, you
want—
?
CORNELIUS
:
Nothin
! [
Lowers his voice
.] While I was in Memphis, burying y’r brother, I wint to a clinic about this chronic digestive trouble of mine. This time I got a genuine diagnosis. It’s something called pancreatitis.
CHARLIE
: They give you anything for it?
CORNELIUS
: They give me a bottle of big green pills
called—
[
Cornelius pulls bottle from pocket. Charlie squints at it
.]
CHARLIE
: C-O-T-A-zyme? Never heard a that.
CORNELIUS
: Three before each meal. Offered me some relief but the expense is awful. When a man’s got to live off pills in the quantity at the price, extortionary, with only temporary relief at best, why, I say it’s time to quit hangin’ on, it’s time for a man to let go.
CHARLIE
: If you feel that way about it, why that’s your decision, huh, Pop?
CORNELIUS
: Damn right it is. And no concern of nobody but mine.
CHARLIE
:
—Under
these circumstances, Pop, I hope it ain’t true that you allowed your insurance to run out.
CORNELIUS
: With inflation completely out of control, I refuse to pay the new rates. People in this country have got to learn to refuse to pay more and more for ev’ry commodity or service which they purchase, including insurance rates.
CHARLIE
: You’ve got Mom to think of.
CORNELIUS
: You think a woman that pants louder’n an ole yard dog is going to outlive me? Doctor tole me privately that if she’d quit stuffin’ an bring down her weight, she could go on a year longer, but she won’t, no way, no way.
CHARLIE
: You got no concern for her, then?
CORNELIUS
: There’s cases in which continued existence is not desirable, Charlie. I mean when the mind is gone.
CHARLIE
: I don’t think that’s true of Mom.
STACEY
[
quietly
]: Lawd.
CORNELIUS
: You haven’t observed her lately. A woman in her condition is not responsible for peculiar behavior and so you can’t blame her for it. I don’t, rarely do, no matter how peculiar it gets and it can get mighty peculiar. Don’t hear half what’s said to her anymore and imagines things
not
said to her. Now, Charlie, excuse me for discussin’ your mother’s folks which is half yours, too, but a good deal of this is hereditary with Bella. I mean, you know the Dancies. Ev’ryone on the Gulf Coast knows about the Dancies. Lunacy runs rampant among them, son. Was you old enough to remember that time your mother’s sister walked naked out of the house at high noon with just a hat on and the hat was a man’s? Sex confusion existed among them, Charlie, never among the McCorkles. Your just buried brother did not take after me, pathetic creature, typical of the Dancies.
CHARLIE
: Not so loud, Pop, Mom’s in the dinin’ room, list’nin’.
CORNELIUS
[
sadly
]: List’nin’ to her blood-pressure, son. She complains it roars in her ears like a stawm sometimes.
CHARLIE
: She’s leanin’ against the table in the dinin’ room.
CORNELIUS
: Never mind, she heard nothin’. Speak to her. You’ll see.
CHARLIE
:
—Mom?
Are you all right in there, Mom?
BELLA
: I grated some onions for the om’lette. I’ll bring it out as soon
as—
Om’lette’s got to be
watched—excuse
me, won’t take long. [
She starts back toward kitchen but staggers dizzily against wall
.]
CORNELIUS
: Help her, seems to
be—
[
Charlie enters the dim dining room area
]
CHARLIE
: Mom?
BELLA
:
—Chips
?
CHARLIE
: No, no, Mom, I’m Charlie.
BELLA
:
Sorry—Yes
, you’re Charlie.
CHARLIE
: Go in front, set with Pop, he’s not well. I’ll take care of the om’lette.
BELLA
: I cook for my men folks and will till I die, Son.
CHARLIE
: I know Mom, but tonight, I think you oughta go in front with Pop. He seems tired and depressed about something. So just go make yourself comfortable on the sofa and sympathize with Pop
about—he’s
got new medical problems. Can you make it? [
Slowly, ceremonially, Charlie conducts Bella into the living room. Gently releases hold on her before sofa. She falls onto it as if struck dead
.]
CORNELIUS
: Bella? Bella? [
Scene freezes a moment or two
.] Can you hear me, Bella?
[
A soft, involuntary wail from Stacey in the shadow on the landing
.]
BELLA
:
—Such
a loud stawm tonight.
Chips—preparin’
om’lette.
CORNELIUS
: Neither of us is in good health here lately. Both have medical problems. Requiring attention and care.
—Can
you hear me, Bella?
BELLA
[
dreamily
]: Chips insisted I let him prepare the om’lette.