Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw Page A

butter?’” Even now, Jack could hear the harsh, rasping, outraged voice in the crowded dressing room, could remember his own feeling, sitting there at the mirror, unnoticed in the riot of denunciation, admiring Delaney, because he, too, understood the failings of the play and despised the people around him who deceived themselves, out of weakness and sentimentality, about it. “‘When I first came to New York,’ Delaney shouted, and he was shaking his fist under the nose of the producer, and I thought he was going to hit him, ‘when I first came to New York, if a play wasn’t any better than this, we would take one look at it and flee to the mountains and leave the scenery to be burnt by the street-cleaning department. And now, today, Holy God, you have the indecency to stand there and tell me you’re going to bring it in! Shame! Shame!’”
    “What did the producer say?” Despière asked. “The producer said, ‘Mr. Delaney, I believe you’re drunk, and he ran out of the dressing room, with the director after him.” Jack chuckled, remembering that panicky flight so long ago.
    “See,” Veronica said, “I told you in those days he was full of excitement—Mr. Delaney.” She had been so interested in what Jack had been saying that she had forgotten to eat, and Jack was conscious all the time of her eyes fixed intently on his face as he spoke.
    “And what about that poor bastard of a writer?” Despière asked. “What did he do? Go out and jump into the river?”
    “No,” Jack said. “Delaney told him to forget this play. It was his first one, anyway, Delaney said, and most of the time, it was a good thing for a man if his first play failed. And Delaney told him how he’d hung around the theatre for seven years before he had any recognition at all and how he was kicked off his first two pictures right in the beginning of shooting. And he said, ‘Listen, kid, this one’s no good, but you’re a talented man, and you’re going to be all right, in the long run.’”
    Jack hesitated. Myers had been talented all right, but in the long run he had been unhappy and taken to the bottle and he had died at the age of thirty-three, but how was Delaney to know that that night in Philadelphia?
    “Then he asked Myers if he had any money and Myers laughed a little and said, ‘Sixty-five dollars,’ and Delaney told him he’d take him out to Hollywood with him right after the play opened, to write Delaney’s next picture, so that he’d have enough money to write another play. And he told him to avoid his friends and relatives on opening night in New York and to come and visit him in his hotel, so Myers wouldn’t have to talk about the play. And that’s what Myers and his girl did. The opening night was a disaster, with people walking out, starting in the middle of the first act, and Myers’ girl weeping in the back row. It was her birthday besides, and she’d got leave from her job in Stamford to celebrate with Myers, because, naturally, she didn’t believe Delaney, she thought the play was the greatest play since Hamlet, and everything was going so wrong. So Myers and his girl went over to Delaney’s hotel on Central Park South and they went up to his suite and he was alone, waiting for them, with a birthday cake with candles for the girl, and he took them down to the bar and got them a little drunk and told them not to read the reviews the next morning, because they could cripple a man forever, he said. Then he asked them where they planned to spend the night. Myers was living in a cold-water flat with two actors, and he couldn’t take his girl there, and she was supposed to stay the night with an uncle and aunt on Morningside Heights, and Delaney told them this was not a night for them to spend apart and he took them to the front desk and he told the clerk, ‘Listen, these’re two friends of mine. They’re not married and I want them to have a great room overlooking the park, high up, where it’s