Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [124]
Patti and I held our jackets over our heads and hurried to the door.
“Hey, Cate?” she said, shaking out her jacket over the kitchen sink.
“Yeah?”
“I gotta tell you, this guy John is a prince.”
“I’m going to spend the rest of my life with him, Patti. I mean, it’s almost like the hand of God is in on this one, you know?”
Patti shook her head at me and laughed.
“I think we’d better start going to church.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Setting: St. Philips Cemetery.
Director’s Note: Photos of New York’s theater district, cover of Mamba’s Daughters, Folly Beach, Christmas in Florida, Janie, and St. Philips Cemetery in the backstage scrim.
Act III
Scene 4
Dorothy: DuBose and I knocked around the New York theater scene for a while after Mamba’s Daughters had its run, and we suffered with the ridiculous relationship we had with our director Guthrie McClintic and his wife. We were in rehearsals and I really thought we should cut a scene. It was just too melodramatic. But Guthrie’s wife was there, weeping at its perfection, and I just stood my ground. Don’t you know he accused me of calling his silly wife a nitwit, which of course I thought she was one but I would never have said it. Anyway, he threw a chair at me, careful to miss me but I thought, that’s it. I can go home to Charleston now and all you crazy people can have New York City. The only thing that saved Mamba’s Daughters was Ethel Waters who sang the lead. Lord, that woman could sing!
And DuBose was feeling the same way that I was, so we decided it was time to go home. It was 1937 and he was offered and accepted a seat on the Carolina Art Association, which managed this very theater. A little later on, with money from a Rockefeller grant, the Dock Street was able to hire DuBose as the resident dramatist. Well, we worked together really. Our mission was to develop local talent, so twice a week, we’d gather up ten local aspiring playwrights and read what they had, critique it, and they’d go home and rewrite it. I loved the work and for DuBose it felt like the old days. We were supremely happy.
Of course there was nothing to prepare us for his mother’s death. On June 10, 1939, Janie died from a heart attack. DuBose was devastated and the depth of his shock was a little frightening to me. He didn’t want to work, he said he was too tired and didn’t feel creative anymore. He started writing to his old friend Hervey Allen, who had moved to Florida, and during the Christmas holidays of 1939, DuBose, Jenifer, and I decided to visit them. Well, we had a wonderful time! Robert Frost was in town and we had the chance to catch up with him and everyone was so happy then. I thought, well maybe DuBose is going to come around. But when we returned to Charleston, DuBose became depressed again. He was worried about money. Janie had not left him very much, but she didn’t have very much to leave anyway. We decided to sell Dawn Hill and we did. To be free of that burden should have cheered him but it seemed there was nothing that could. He was sluggish and blue and I was at my wits’ end.
We were up in North Carolina, staying with our friends, the Matthews. I thought he should see a doctor before we went to MacDowell for the season but he refused. Finally, he agreed to see a doctor who was a cousin of his, Allen Jervey. Allen suspected a heart ailment but didn’t think there was an imminent danger. But on the way home from the doctor’s, DuBose had terrible chest pain. Margaret Matthew, my dear friend, drove him back to Allen at the hospital in Tryon and DuBose died there. Just like that. It was Sunday, June 16, one year and one week after his mother died. I was a widow and my daughter was fatherless, the same way I was when I was her age. Jenifer never spoke her father’s name again.
We laid him to rest beneath the venerable oaks in St. Philips cemetery. You know, DuBose was not a regular churchgoer. So it didn’t seem appropriate