Follies of God Page 3

  Tenn paused and looked into the courtyard, not for human contact, but for a distant spot into which he could stare and think. His eyes were lightly misted, but he brushed away any emotion, and returned his attentions to me.

  “A few years ago,” he continued, “a friend in publishing told me of a typeface bearing a most marvelous name: Friz Quadrata. Very bold, very stylish. I was given some samples of this typeface, and they were on a sheet of paper upon which you could press and they would stick to whatever you had devised for a communicative purpose. Pressure letters, they’re called. What a lovely title that is: ‘Pressure Letters.’

  “I can waste a good day applying these pressure letters to surfaces of pale judgment that cry out for a story or a woman speaking to us, and I can fool myself that I am writing, that I am praying to that same fucking God again to allow me to hear the distant voices, the distant music, to bring forth words.

  “I now imagine the names of my great influences, and I see them in this great and bold typeface, and I focus and I pray and I am not bitter. I am grateful that they have been in my life and continue to be in my life, and I hope to be of use to them again. To matter.

  “If there is a God, I think that he realized upon creating the world, upon making the mud and man—the rudiments, the utilities of the world—he needed color and beauty and analysis of what he had made, and he made woman, not from dust of the earth or spit or rain or sweat, but from the bone of a man. Now there’s a title, too: ‘The Bone of a Man.’ ”

  Another pause, a slight laugh.

  “So God presented us with the follies of God, the great and immortal truth of his humor and comfort and care and taste. And at night, in the dark, without my radio, without my rosary, without a word to place on the pale judgment, I see, without effort, and with great peace, the names of these women in Friz Quadrata type on the screen above my bed or on the lids of my tired eyes. And I can dream, and I can sometimes write, but I can always, always believe again.

  “And so, baby, that is proof enough for me that there are higher powers and better stations awaiting us—awaiting you—and a woman will lead us to them.”

  Tenn then picked up his menu and handed it to me. He pointed to it and said only one word: “Write.”

  Over the next twenty minutes or so, Tenn dictated to me the names of the people he wanted both of us to pray to, dream of, write for.

  He called them the follies of God, and I wrote down the names.

  The menu was soon covered with names, primarily women, and then Tenn offered me an assignment.

  “I would like for you to ask these people if I ever mattered,” he confessed. “I ask you to go to them because these people have mattered to me, and they keep me going—to the pale judgment, to face another day, to care again.”

  The tone of the lunch changed abruptly. I was no longer the rube from Baton Rouge seeking advice and counsel; I was his partner in a venture that would bolster us both. I would go to New York and I would go to these people with a message from Tenn, after which the topic of Tenn mattering would be broached. I would then call or write Tenn and let him know what had been said.

  “I am keeping the disease of bitterness firmly at bay,” he said. “I’ve been to the bottom of that barrel, and I’m not going there again. I am no longer angry, baby. A little aggrieved, perhaps, but anger is a voracious cancer on the soul and the talent: it cripples the instincts, leaves you open to all manner of bad things.”

  Bitterness was kept at bay by a pronounced concentration on those people who had mattered to him, would matter again, and who might be of some value in pouring some fog on his mental proscenium and allowing some women to come forth and begin talking. He had taken an old rosary—given to him more than a decade earlier, when he had converted to Roman Catholicism—and he had renamed the mysteries and each bead along its length. There were no longer mysteries reserved for the crucifixion or the giving of water as the burdensome cross was carried. Instead there were beads bearing the memory and imagined visages of Jessica Tandy, Kim Stanley, Maureen Stapleton, Maria Tucci, Irene Worth, Marian Seldes, William Inge, Elia Kazan, John Guare—far too many names, so the beads had to be rotated, understudies taking over for leads, Beatrice Straight sometimes being called forward to take over the bead reserved for Geraldine Page, her memory caressed, recalled, blessed.

  My assignment would be to knock on the doors of these people and relate to them what Tenn felt about them, then tarry and see if the thought was reciprocated, if they believed that Tenn mattered.

  “There is very little that I can do well,” he confessed. “I cannot have or care for a child. I cannot prepare a meal satisfactorily—the dishes never emerge at the appropriate times. I cannot even eat a meal when I would like to. Things are falling apart; I lack mental and glandular flexibility. My brain doesn’t produce the creative fog, or words or sentences that share anything but the dusty refuse that resides in my skull. I cannot even be a friend for any sustained period of time, because my boundaries, always gently traced in sand—sands of madness—have been blown away and I can’t retrace them. I cannot, you see, really do anything, can’t relate to anything, but goddammit, I thought once, and I think still, that I can write. Can’t I get a single witness to whom I once delivered pages and deliverance to say that I once mattered?”

  I accepted the assignment. I took out my first blue book and began to take the notes, to receive the directions to find my way to the people who had mattered to Tenn.

  “One more thing,” Tenn interjected, as I began to write. “I would like to call you Dixie. It seems appropriate.”

  I nodded and returned to my blue book and the description of the first folly of God. I wrote her name: Maureen Stapleton.

  Two

  HER THEATRICAL LIFE began in circumstances similar to Tenn’s: in the darkness, with a radio attached to her body and a deep desire to be transported.

  “I’m a dumb broad,” she would admit to me, “and I don’t always know what I mean, and I don’t always say what I should say, but I so understood what it meant to be transported. I wanted out! The radio was my first taste of an ‘out there’ that I had to get to, that I believed was a salvation of sorts; and later, I lived in the movies, looking for the same thing—that crazy belief that I could get there and away from … this.”

  Early on she was allowed access to the radio that resided in the living room, and she would continue to listen deep into the night. Later she was given her own radio, and while Maureen did not recall her model being as grand as Tenn’s—there was no resemblance to cathedrals that she could recall—she did keep it near her, on the bedside table, and when she tried to imagine that a male actor in a radio serial was speaking directly to her, she would place it in the bed, right next to her face. “I believed,” she told me, “I had to believe, that dreaming and praying and hoping would change things.”

  Maureen and Tenn would remain bonded—through many years and many circumstances—by their insistent belief that to dream was to change things; that to cast an ideal image into the mental theater (Maureen’s was a huge Art Deco movie palace; Tenn’s a stately theater meant for great plays) was to begin to change lives and paths. These were two friends who could meet at any time, under any circumstances, and begin to talk out their methods of escape.

  Maureen and Tenn also shared what they laughingly called joint custody of a dreaming spine that would neither bend nor break. “It wasn’t so much that Tennessee and I were committed to what we dreamed—we were—but we were also incapable, unable, unwilling to do anything else. I mean, what could we do? Attached to radios and mothers and dreams—what else was there for us to be? Had we failed … Well, we dreamers don’t think about that. We push that away with another dream, another drink. I never gave up, because there was nothing else I could do or wanted to do, not because I have some incredible will of steel. I just didn’t know what else I could possibly do. And maybe the misfits like me do better because we can’t marry for money and be a s
weet wife at the door at the end of the day; we can’t become a terrific secretary; we can’t sell anything but our dream of being an actress—we can’t write or edit or search the world for those who can. We can’t do a damn thing but wait for someone to write a part that speaks to us. And Tennessee could only write. It was all he really did well; it was all he could do where he felt comfort and power. It’s not so much refusing to give up as just sidling along and repeatedly trying, repeatedly failing, until you get a break. And maybe I kept at it because I really wanted to piss off all those people who told me I wouldn’t make it. And maybe I kept at it because I wanted to honor the kid who dreamed all this up. I don’t know, but I kept at it. However you can manage it, keep at it. And Tennessee and I both kept at it, through a lot of thin, wet times, but we stuck it out. Tennessee and I had our movies and our mothers.”

  Maureen felt comfortable sharing her dreams with her mother and her aunts, single women who raised her in Troy, New York, when her father abandoned them. These women were angry, funny, fueled with an almost diabolical melancholy, and movies and weekly Mass were their methods of emotional release and comfort.

  “I wanted my movies big and dumb and shiny,” Maureen admitted. “Serious stuff was too much like life, too much like the drama that was my daily bread. I wanted shiny floors and dancing; singing; silly people who had lots of beautiful clothes and food and people who left to do wonderful things and came back and told stories. People only walked out to get better things to bring into your life; they didn’t abandon the life—the cards—they’d been dealt. They coped and looked good. They didn’t work at notions counters and drink too much beer and bitch into the night about injustice and Irish men. They had good lighting and futures, and that’s what I wanted.”

  Maureen and Tenn never abandoned their nightly reveries: they both thrived in the darkness—it erased the unsatisfactory surroundings into which they had born, and in which they repeatedly found themselves. “We always got to the bad points,” Maureen said, “so that we could get to the dreaming part, the getting-in-the-bed-and-sorting-things-out part, the understanding that we could do nothing else. And we always found each other, no matter how bad the times or how far apart we had become. And I still do this, and I still look for points of escape and entry.”

  Maureen paused and thought for a minute.

  “I don’t know how I thought I would do it,” she confessed, “but I really thought that this fat little girl from Troy was going to be able to enter ballrooms or dining rooms or whatever setting I liked that night and introduce myself. I didn’t grow up thinking I was especially adorable or likable, but I somehow thought that I would be understood by anybody on the ‘other side,’ the folks who had gotten there. I imagined that they had grown up hearing their mother cry herself to sleep; that they had been abandoned and rendered worthless by their fathers; that they didn’t understand the rhythms and regulations of daily life, as I didn’t. I thought they would embrace me and tell me I was home. And I still think this way, and so did Tenn—until the very end.”

  While Tenn loved his mother, he was frequently frustrated by her, irritated by her intrusions on his life and what he called his ambulatory dreaming, but what he most resented was that she never offered help. “My mother wanted very badly to help,” Tenn told me. “Her desire was to help. She frequently told me and my sister that if she could only help, she would. She craved the ability to help and to love, but she didn’t know how to do it. My mother gave me the dreams, and she infused me with so much passion and drama, not to mention an eye for a story, an eye for characters and details, but she couldn’t hold me or love me in a way that made me feel safe for very long. This Maureen could do for me. Maureen always helped. Always. Not merely in the way that she could—that horrible, niggardly offer so many people make: ‘I am doing what I can; I am doing what I think I should.’ Maureen gave fully and immediately and consistently. Maureen broke her own bank to see to it that I was safe.”

  Maureen loved her mother, even if she failed to understand her, even if she resented her stubborn sadness. “Of course, I have become my mother,” Maureen confessed. “We all do, I suppose, but I’m the same way. I can harbor a grudge or cry over an injustice my whole life, just sit and piss away my life on utter bullshit, and that’s what she did, and I thought I knew better and would never do anything but head out for the shiny life. And whatever shiny life Tennessee and I dreamed for ourselves, we set a place, put aside a chair, for our mothers.”

  “The care and feeding and placement of mothers,” Tenn told me, “has been one of my life’s greatest obsessions.”

  Maureen fantasized that she would take her mother with her to the better places. They made a great pair, laughing at the same things, loving the same things, creating a commotion. “Until I had my kids,” Maureen told me, “nothing gave me greater pleasure than sharing with my mother. My heart would swell until it hurt, and I would be dizzy with gratitude. I wanted her out of the same place I’d come from, but she didn’t have the same drive to get out that I did. I think she found a level of comfort in her sad little corner.”

  And Tenn?

  “Tenn kept writing plays,” Maureen said, “and throwing pretty things at his mother, all in the hope that she would tell him he was a man, a grown-up, that he had done well. And on those soggy nights in the dark, I never heard from him that this had happened. I think that Edwina withheld praise until her last breath.”

  “Perhaps I stopped trying so hard to reach my mother, to have my mother love me,” Tenn told me, “because Maureen came into my life. There were other women as well, but Maureen was the greatest, safest place to fall. By finding these women in my life, I no longer felt the great need to connect with and know my mother. I began to look outside of my mother’s heart and my own biography for answers to things.”

  Maureen Stapleton was born on a cruelly hot day in June of 1925, a day so hot that her mother was momentarily comforted by the water that broke and cascaded down her legs, announcing the arrival of her daughter. Maureen loved to tell and retell the story of her mother, in her simple cotton shift, now spattered with water, and her legs shiny with expectant motherhood, rushing to give birth to her “perfect, pudgy” baby.

  “I have always been known for my entrances,” Maureen remarked drily.

  She was equally known for her departures, for her long, frequently miserable absences from friends and family and work, but the primary damage seems always to have been self-inflicted. “No one creates more pernicious scenarios for herself than Mo,” Tenn told me, using the favored nickname for the actress. “She is forever on the precipice of some horrendous disaster, and inevitably, she is the only person aware of it. And then,” he remarked with wonder, “it just blows over, and becomes another of her rich anecdotes.”

  “Do not,” Maureen told me once, after another so-called disaster in her life, “ever worry about me insofar as drama and food are concerned. I always get my share.”

  This ravenous need for drama, for attention, and—she was ashamed to admit—her desire to be rescued, and loved anew after her salvation, began at an early age.

  “Tennessee and I truly loved each other,” she said, “and we were bound by our love of the theater and movies and movie stars and comedy. And we were bound to each other particularly by our mothers: the way they raised us; the things they said, the things they never could say; the things they gave us. The dreaming nature, most of all.”

  “I have been very fortunate,” Tenn told me. “I have been recognized and I have made a considerable amount of money being so recognized. But I cannot escape the persistent curiosity to know about what else exists in the world, and what things might have been like if the wheels of fate had shifted just a little bit on a given day. Whatever happens to me, I need to know that I can commiserate with a friend—particularly Maureen—and lie in the dark and wonder and marvel and cackle at how it happened and how it might have been better or worse or something entirely different. I know t
hat this act of getting into a dark place with Maureen makes her my great friend, but I also think that the act of doing this, of being with her in these dreams, keeps me an artist. Maureen keeps me dreaming.”

  “Tennessee keeps me moving,” Maureen told me. “He likes to dream, and so do I, but my dream is always to keep things moving. I can’t bear stillness.” Maureen could remember with clarity the fear she felt at the repetitiveness of her life, of the routines in her household, at her school, among her schoolmates; often feeling the need to scream, if only to break the monotony. “I sometimes felt,” she said, “that if I didn’t break up the routine of things, I would literally freeze, just turn into a pillar of salt or shit and be stuck in that same position for the rest of my life in a schoolroom or on a front porch in Troy, New York, and I would just create a racket to break things up, move me an inch or so farther from paralysis.”

  The fuel for her “rackets” was provided by the scenarios in films and on the radio, and Maureen began to spend more time alone in her room. “I needed to be alone with the stories,” she told me, “so I could dream and find the little sliver of time and opportunity I could slip into.” Maureen shared with Tenn a childhood and adolescence peppered with family concern for their solitude, their moodiness, their long stretches of silence and dreaming. “Why,” Tenn asked me once, “is it so bad to dream? Why is the honor solely in submitting to reality? To what is present and ready? I never understood why I was odd for wanting to be detached.” “I’ve got to tell you,” Maureen marveled, “I would be hard-pressed to think of a happier time. The dreaming, I’m telling you, is the best. Screaming against paralysis is the greatest—it’s all downhill from there.”