[LAURA utters a startled, doubtful laugh. She reaches quickly for a piece of glass.]
LAURA: But, Mother
AMANDA: Yes? [Crossing to photograph.]
LAURA [in a tone of frightened apology]: I’m – crippled!
[IMAGE: SCREEN.]
AMANDA: Nonsense! Laura, I’ve told you never, never to use that word. Why, you’re not crippled, you just have a little defect – hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it – develop charm – and vivacity and – charm! That’s all you have to do![She turns again to the photograph.] One thing your father had plenty of – was charm![Tom motions to the fiddle in the wings.]
[THE SCENE FADES OUT WITH MUSIC]
SCENE 3
[LEGEND ON SCREEN: “AFTER THE FIASCO”]
[TOM speaks from the fire-escape landing.]
TOM: After the fiasco at Rubicam’s Business College, the idea of getting a gentleman caller for Laura began to play a more and more important part in Mother’s calculations. It became an obsession. Like some archetype of the universal unconscious, the image of the gentleman caller haunted our small apartment. […IMAGE: YOUNG MAN AT DOOR WITH FLOWERS.]
An evening at home rarely passed without some allusion to this image, this spectre, this hope. Even when he wasn’t mentioned, his presence hung in Mother’s preoccupied look and in my sister’s frightened, apologetic manner – hung like a sentence passed upon the Wingfields! Mother was a woman of action as well as words. She began to take logical steps in the planned direction. Late that winter and in the early spring – realizing that extra money would be needed to properly feather the nest and plume the bird – she conducted a vigorous campaign on the- telephone, roping in subscribers to one of those magazines for matrons calledThe Home-maker’s Companion, the type of journal that features the serialized, sublimations of ladies of letters who think in terms of delicate cup-like breasts, slim, tapering waists, rich, creamy thighs, eyes like wood-smoke in autumn, fingers that soothe and caress like strains of music, bodies as powerful as Etruscan sculpture.