Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (11 page)

[
The following scene should be played with
great concentration, with most of the power leashed but palpable in what is left
unspoken.
]

Who else's suggestion is it, is it
yours?
How many others thought that Skipper and I
were—

BIG DADDY
[
gently
]:

Now, hold on, hold on a minute, son.—I knocked around in my time.

BRICK:

What's that got to do with—

BIG DADDY:

I said “Hold on! “—I bummed, I bummed this country till I
was—

BRICK:

Whose suggestion, who else's suggestion is it?

BIG DADDY:

Slept in hobo jungles and railroad Y's and flophouses in all cities before
I—

BRICK:

Oh,
you
think so, too, you call me your son and a queer.
Oh! Maybe that's why you put Maggie and me in this room that was Jack
Straw's and Peter Ochello's, in which that pair of old sisters slept
in a double bed where both of ‘em died!

BIG DADDY:

Now just don't go throwing rocks at—

[
Suddenly Reverend Tooker appears in the
gallery doors, his head slightly, playfully, fatuously cocked, with a practised
clergyman's smile, sincere as a bird call blown on a
hunter's
whistle, the living embodiment of the pious, conventional
lie.

[
Big Daddy gasps a little at this perfectly
timed, but incongruous, apparition.
]

—What're you lookin’ for, Preacher?

REVEREND TOOKER:

The gentleman's lavatory, ha ha!—heh, heh . . .

BIG DADDY
[
with
strained courtesy
]:

—Go back out and walk down to the other end of the gallery, Reverend Tooker,
and use the bathroom connected with my bedroom, and if you can't find it, ask
them where it is!

REVEREND TOOKER:

Ah, thanks.

[
He goes out with a deprecatory
chuckle.
]

BIG DADDY:

It's hard to talk in this place . . .

BRICK:

Son of a—!

BIG DADDY
[
leaving a lot unspoken
]:

—I seen all things and understood a lot of them, till 1910. Christ, the year
that—I had worn my shoes through, hocked my—I hopped off a yellow dog
freight car half a mile down the road, slept in a wagon of cotton outside the
gin—Jack Straw an’ Peter Ochello took me in. Hired me to manage this
place which grew into this one.—When Jack Straw
died—why, old Peter Ochello quit eatin’ like a dog does when its
master's dead, and died, too!

BRICK:

Christ!

BIG DADDY:

I'm just saying I understand such—

BRICK
[
violently
]:

Skipper is dead. I have not quit eating!

BIG DADDY:

No, but you started drinking.

[
Brick wheels on his crutch and hurls his
glass across the room shouting.
]

BRICK:

YOU THINK SO, TOO?

BIG DADDY:

Shhh!

[
Footsteps run on the gallery. There
are
women's calls.

[
Big Daddy goes toward the
door.
]

Go way!—Just broke a glass . . . .

[
Brick is transformed, as if a quiet
mountain blew suddenly up in volcanic flame.
]

BRICK:

You think so, too? You think so, too? You think me an’ Skipper
did, did, did
—sodomy!—together?

BIG DADDY:

Hold—!

BRICK:

That what you—

BIG DADDY:

—ON—a minute!

BRICK:

You think we did dirty things between us, Skipper an'—

BIG DADDY:

Why are you shouting like that? Why are you—

BRICK:

—Me, is that what you think of Skipper, is that—

BIG DADDY:

—so excited? I don't think nothing. I don't know
nothing.

I'm simply telling you what—

BRICK:

You think that Skipper and me were a pair of dirty old men?

BIG DADDY:

Now that's—

BRICK:

Straw? Ochello? A couple of—

BIG DADDY:

Now just—

BRICK:

—ducking sissies? Queers? Is that what you—

BIG DADDY:

Shhh.

BRICK:

—think?

[
He loses his balance and pitches to his
knees without noticing the pain. He grabs the bed and drags himself
up.
]

BIG DADDY:

Jesus!—Whew . . . . Grab my hand!

BRICK:

Naw, I don't want your hand . . . .

BIG DADDY:

Well, I want yours. Git up!

[
He draws him up, keeps an arm about him
with concern and affection.
]

You broken out in a sweat! You're panting like
you'd run a race with—

BRICK
[freeing himself from his father's
hold
]:

Big Daddy, you shock me, Big Daddy, you,
you-shock
me!

Talkin’ so—

[
He turns away from his
father.
]

—casually!—about a—thing like that . . .

—Don't you know how people
feel
about things like that? How, how
disgusted
they are by things like that? Why, at Ole Miss when it
was discovered a pledge to our fraternity, Skipper's and mine, did a,
attempted
to do a, unnatural thing with—

We not only dropped him like a hot rock!—We told him to
git off the campus, and he did, he got!—All the way to—

[
He halts, breathless.
]

BIG DADDY:

—Where?

BRICK:

—North Africa, last I heard!

BIG DADDY:

Well, I have come back from further away than that, I have just now returned from the
other side of the moon, death's country, son, and I'm not easy to
shock by anything here.

[
He comes downstage and faces
out.
]

Always, anyhow, lived with too much space around me to be infected by
ideas of other people. One thing you can grow on a big place more important than
cotton!—is
tolerance!—
I
grown it.

[
He returns toward
Brick.
]

BRICK:

Why can't exceptional friendship,
real, real, deep, deep
friendship!
between two men be respected as something clean and
decent without being thought of as—

BIG DADDY:

It can, it is, for God's sake.

BRICK:

—Fairies . . . .

[
In his utterance of this word, we gauge the
wide and profound reach of the conventional mores he got from the world that
crowned him with early laurels.
]

BIG DADDY:

I told Mae an’ Gooper—

BRICK:

Frig Mae and Gooper, frig all dirty lies and liars!—Skipper and me had
a clean, true thing between us!—had a clean friendship, practically
all our lives, till Maggie got the idea
you're talking
about. Normal? No!—It was too rare to be normal, any true thing
between two people is too rare to be normal. Oh, once in a while he put his hand on
my shoulder or I'd put mine on his, oh, maybe even, when we were touring the
country in pro-football an’ shared hotel-rooms we'd
reach across the space between the two beds and shake hands to say goodnight, yeah,
one or two times we—

BIG DADDY:

Brick, nobody thinks that that's not normal!

BRICK:

Well, they're mistaken, it was! It was a pure an’ true thing
an’ that's not normal.

[
They both stare straight at each other for
a long moment. The tension breaks and both turn away as if
tired.
]

BIG DADDY:

Yeah, it's—hard t'—talk. . .

BRICK:

All right, then, let's—let it go . . . .

BIG DADDY:

Why did Skipper crack up? Why have you?

[
Brick looks back at his father again. He
has already decided, without knowing that he has made this decision, that he is
going to tell his father that he is dying of cancer. Only this could even the
score between them: one inadmissible thing in return for
another.
]

BRICK
[
ominously
]:

All right. You're asking for it, Big Daddy. We're finally going to have
that real true talk you wanted. It's too late to stop it, now, we got to
carry it through and cover every subject.

[
He hobbles back to the liquor
cabinet.
]

Uh-huh.

[
He opens the ice bucket and picks up the
silver tongs with slow admiration of their frosty
brightness.
]

Maggie declares that Skipper and I went into pro-football after
we left “Ole Miss” because we were scared to grow up . . .

[
He moves downstage with the shuffle
and clop of a cripple on a crutch. As Margaret did when her
speech became “recitative,” he looks out into the house
,
commanding its attention by his direct, concentrated
gaze—a broken, “tragically elegant” figure telling simply
as much as he knows of “the Truth”:
]

—Wanted to—keep on tossing—those long,
long!—high, high!—passes that—couldn't be
intercepted except by time, the aerial attack that made us famous! And so we
did, we did, we kept it up for one season, that aerial attack, we held it
high!—Yeah, but—

—that summer, Maggie, she laid the law down to me, said, Now or
never, and so I married Maggie . . . .

BIG DADDY:

How was Maggie in bed?

BRICK
[
wryly
]:

Great! the greatest!

[
Big Daddy nods as if he thought
so.
]

She went on the road that fall with the Dixie Stars. Oh, she made a
great show of being the world's best sport. She wore a—wore
a—tall bearskin cap! A shako, they call it, a dyed moleskin coat, a
moleskin coat dyed red!—Cut up crazy!
Rented hotel ballrooms for victory celebrations, wouldn't cancel them
when it—turned out—defeat . . . .

MAGGIE THE CAT! Ha ha!

[
Big Daddy nods.
]

—But Skipper, he had some fever which came back on him which
doctors couldn't explain and I got that injury—turned out to be just a
shadow on the X-ray plate—and a touch of bursitis . . . .

I lay in a hospital bed, watched our games on TV, saw Maggie on the
bench next to Skipper when he was hauled out of a game for stumbles,
fumbles!—Burned me up the way she hung on his
arm!—Y'know, I think that Maggie had always felt sort of left
out because she and me never got any closer together than two people just get in
bed, which is not much closer than two cats on a—fence humping . . . .

So! She took this time to work on poor dumb Skipper. He was a
less than average student at Ole Miss, you know that, don't
you?!—Poured in his mind the dirty, false idea that what we
were, him and me, was a frustrated case of that ole pair of sisters that lived in
this room, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello!—He, poor Skipper, went to bed
with Maggie to prove it wasn't true, and when it didn't work out, he
thought it
was
true!—Skipper broke in two
like a rotten stick—nobody ever turned so fast
to
a lush—or died of it so quick. . . .

—Now are you satisfied?

[
Big Daddy has listened to this story,
dividing the grain from the chaff. Now he looks at his son.
]

BIG DADDY:

Are
you
satisfied?

BRICK:

With what?

BIG DADDY:

That half-ass story!

BRICK:

What's half-ass about it?

BIG DADDY:

Something's left out of that story. What did you leave out?

[
The phone has started ringing in the hall.
As if it reminded him of something, Brick glances suddenly toward the sound and
says:
]

BRICK:

Yes! —I left out a long—distance call which I had from Skipper,
in which he made a drunken confession to me and on which I hung
up!—last time we spoke to each other in our lives . . . .

[
Muted ring stops as someone answers phone
in a soft, indistinct voice in hall.
]

BIG DADDY:

You hung up?

BRICK:

Hung up. Jesus! Well—

BIG DADDY:

Anyhow now!—we have tracked down the lie with which you're
disgusted and which you are drinking to kill your disgust with, Brick. You been
passing the buck. This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself.

You!—
dug the grave of your
friend and kicked him in it!—before you'd face truth with
him!

BRICK:

His
truth, not
mine!

BIG DADDY:

His truth, okay! But you wouldn't face it with him!

BRICK:

Who
can
face truth? Can
you?

BIG DADDY:

Now don't start passin’ the rotten buck again, boy!

BRICK:

How about these birthday congratulations, these many, many happy
returns of the day, when ev'rybody but you knows there won't be
any!