Read A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur for Free Online Page B

seated at her vanity table and mellowed by her mebaral and sherry
“
cocktail,” soliloquizes
.
    DOROTHEA [
taking a large swallow of sherry
]: Best years of my youth thrown away, wasted on poor Hathaway James. [
She removes his picture from the vanity table and with closed eyes thrusts it out of sight
.] Shouldn’t say wasted but so unwisely devoted. Not even sure it was love. Unconsummated love, is it really love? More likely just a reverence for his talent—precocious achievements . . . musical prodigy. Scholarship to Juilliard, performed a concerto with the Nashville Symphony at fifteen. [
She sips more sherry
.] But those dreadful embarrassing evenings on Aunt Belle’s front porch in Memphis! He’d say: “Turn out the light, it’s attracting insects.” I’d switch it out. He’d grab me so tight it would take my breath away, and invariably I’d feel plunging, plunging against me that—that—frantic part of him . . . then he’d release me at once and collapse on the porch swing, breathing hoarsely. With the corner gas lamp shining through the wisteria vines, it was impossible not to notice the wet stain spreading on his light flannel trousers. . . . Miss Gluck, MOP IN!!
    [
Miss Gluck, who has timidly opened the bathroom door and begun to emerge, with the mop, into the bedroom, hastily retreats from sight
.]
    Such afflictions—visited on the gifted. . . . Finally worked up the courage to discuss the—Hathaway’s—problem with the family doctor, delicately but clearly as I could. “Honey, this Hathaway fellow’s afflicted with something clinically known as—chronic case of—premature ejaculation—must have a largelaundry bill. . . .” “Is it curable, Doctor?”—“Maybe with great patience, honey, but remember you’re only young once, don’t gamble on it, relinquish him to his interest in music, let him go.”
    [
Miss Gluck’s mop protrudes from the bathroom again
.]
    MISS GLUCK, I SAID MOP IN. REMAIN IN BATHROOM WITH WET MOP TILL MOP UP COMPLETED. MERCIFUL HEAVENS.
    [
Helena and Bodey are now seen in the living room
.]
    HELENA: Is Dorothea attempting a conversation with Miss Gluck in there?
    BODEY: No, no just to herself—you gave her the sherry on top of mebaral tablets.
    HELENA: She talks to herself? That isn’t a practice that I would encourage her in.
    BODEY: She don’t need no encouragement in it, and as for you, I got an idea you’d encourage nobody in nothing.
    DOROTHEA [
in the bedroom
]: After Hathaway James, there was nothing left for me but—CIVICS .
    HELENA [
who has moved to the bedroom door the better to hear Dorothea’s “confessions
”]: This is not to B. B.!
    BODEY : Stop listening at the door. Go back to your pigeon watching.
    HELENA: How long is this apt to continue?
    DOROTHEA: Oh, God, thank you that Ralph Ellis has no such affliction—is healthily aggressive.
    HELENA: I have a luncheon engagement in La Due at two!
    BODEY: Well, go keep it! On time!
    HELENA: My business with Dorothea must take precedence over anything else! [
Helena pauses to watch with amused suspicion as Bodey “attacks” the Sunday
Post-Dispatch
which she has picked up from the chair
.] What is that you’re doing, Miss Bodenheifer?
    BODEY: Tearing a certain item out of the paper.
    HELENA: A ludicrous thing to do since the news will be all over Blewett High School tomorrow.
    BODEY: Never mind tomorrow. There’s ways and ways to break a piece of news like that to a girl with a heart like Dotty. You wouldn’t know about that, no, you’d do it right now—malicious! —You got eyes like a bird and I don’t mean a songbird.
    HELENA: Oh, is that
so?
    BODEY: Yeh, yeh, that’s so, I know!
    [
Pause. Bodey, who has torn out about half of the top page of one section, puts the rest of the paper on the sofa, and takes the section from which the piece has been torn with her as she crosses to the kitchenette, crumpling and throwing the torn piece into the wastebasket on her