Long Day's Journey Into Night Page #13

you're going, you'll be cured in six months or a year at most.

Don't kid me...

you think I'm gonna die.

- That's a lie! You're crazy!

- So why waste money? That's why you're sending me to a state farm.

What state farm? It's the Hill Town Sanatorium, that's all I know.

Both doctors told me it's the best place for you.

For the money. Or for nothing or practicly nothing.

Don't lie Papa. You know damn well Hill Town Sanatorium is a state institution.

- Jamie suspected you'd cry "poor house" to Hardy and wormed the truth out of him.

- That drunken loafer! I'll kick him out in the gutter!

- He's poisoned your mind against me ever since you were old enough to listen.

- You can't deny it's true about the state farm, can you?

It's not true the way you look at it.

What if it is run by the state, that's nothing against it.

The state has money to make a better place than any private sanatorium.

And why shouldn't I take advantage of it?

It's my right and yours, we're residents, I'm a property owner.

I help to support it. I'm taxed to death...

- Yes, on property valued at a quarter of a million.

- Lies. That's all mortgaged.

- Hardy and the specialist know what you're worth.

- All I told them was I was no millionaire that could afford such a sanatorium

because I was land poor. That's the truth.

- Then you went to the club and you met McGuire and

"you let him stick you with another bum piece of property".

- It's not true.

- Don't worry about it.

We met McGuire in the hotel bar after you left.

Jamie kidded him about hooking you and he winked and laughed.

- You liar.

- No lie about it!

God Papa!

Ever since I went to see him was on my own and found out what it felt like

to be broke and starved.

And I tried to be fair to you because I knew what you'd

Well...

Who's play is it?

"A stinking ols miser"

Well maybe you're right.

Maybe I can't help being....

Although all my life, since I had anything,

I've thrown money over the bar to buy drinks for everyone in the house

or loaned money to sponges that I knew would never pay back.

But of course that was in bar-rooms when I was full of whiskey.

Can't feel that way about it when I'm sober in my home.

It was at home I first learned the value

of a dollar and the fear of the poor house.

I've never been able to believe in my luck since.

You said you realize what I'd been up against as a boy.

The hell you do. How could you?

You had everything. Nurses, schools...

I know you've had a spell of hard work with your back and hands

and a bit of being homeless and penniless in a foreign land and I respect

you for it. But it was a game of romance and adventure to you.

- It was play.

- Yes, particularly the time I tried to commit suicide at Jimmy the Priest's

- and almost did.

- You weren't in your right mind. No son of mine would ever...

- You were drunk.

- I was stone cold sober. That was the trouble. I stopped to think too long.

Don't start your damned atheist morbidness again.

I don't care to listen.

I was trying to make plain to you.

What do you know of the value of a dollar?

When I was ten... my father deserted my

mother and went back to Ireland to die.

Which he did, soon enough and deserved to

and I hope he's roasting in hell.

He mistook rat poison for flour or sugar or something...

There was gossip it wasn't by mistake but that's a lie.

No one in my family would ever...

My bet is it wasn't by mistake.

More morbidness. Your brother put that in your head.

The worst he can suspect is the only truth for him.

But never mind.

My mother was left... a stranger in a strange land with four small children.

There was no damned romance in our poverty.

Twice we were evicted from the miserable hovel we called home.

My mother's few sticks of furniture thrown out on the gutter.

My mother and sisters crying.

I cried too, though I tried hard not to.

But I was the man of the family

at ten years old.

There was no more school for me.

I went to work twelve hours a day in a machine shop.

Learning to make files.

Dirty barn of a place where rain dripped through the roof.

You roasted in the summer, there was no stove in winter. Your hands were numb

with cold. The only light came through two small filthy windows.

So on gray days I'd have to sit bent over,

my eyes almost touching the files in order to see.

You talk of work.

What do you think I got for it?

Fifty cents a week.

It's the truth. Fifty cents a week.

My poor mother washed and scrubbed for the yanks.

Well I remember one thanksgiving...

or maybe it was christmas

some yank in whose house mother had been scrubbing gave her a dollar extra

for a present. On the way home she spent it all on food.

I remember her hugging and kissing us and saying,

tears of joy running down her tired face,

"glory be to God! For once in our lives there will be enough for each of us."

Fine brave sweet woman!

Never was a finer or a braver!

- Yes, she must have been.

- It was in those days I learned to be a miser.

A dollar was worth so much then.

Once you've learned the lesson it's hard to unlearn it.

You have to look for bargains.

If I took this state farm for a good bargain you'll have to forgive me.

The doctors did tell me it was a good place, you must believe that Edmund.

But I swear I never meant for you to go there if you didn't want to.

You can go to any place you choose, never mind what it costs.

Any place... I can afford.

Any place... within reason.

What about our game?

Whose play is it?

I don't know.

Mine I guess.

No it's yours.

Yes.

Maybe life overdid the lesson for me

and made a dollar worth too much.

And that mistake ruined my career as a fine actor.

I've never admited this to anyone before lad

but tonight Im so heartsick I feel at the end of everything

and whats the use of fake pride and pretense?

That God damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success

in, a great money success, it ruined me with it's promise of an easy fortune.

I didn't want to do anything else.

By the time I woke up to the fact I'd become a slave

to the damn thing and did try other plays it was too late.

They'd identified me with that one part and didn't want me in anything else.

They were right too.

I'd lost the great talent I once had through years of easy repetition,

never learning a new part never really working hard.

Thirty-five to forty thousand dollars net profit a season!

Like snapping your fingers.

Yet before I bought the damn thing I was considered one of the three

or four young actors with the greatest artistic promise in America.

I'd work like hell!

I left a good job as a machinist to take supers' parts because

I loved the theater. I was wild with ambition.

I read all the plays ever written.

I studied Shakespeare as you'd study the Bible.

I got rid of an irish brogue(accent) you could cut with a knife.

I loved Shakespeare. I'd have acted in any of his plays for nothing

For the joy of being alive in his great poetry.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes