Three Plays by Tennessee Williams Page B

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 laurel.]
     
    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 be 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