Free Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates Page A

Isn't that true, darling?
     They would all agree, and the happy implication was that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture. It was in the face of this defiance, and in tentative reply to this loneliness, that the idea of the Laurel Players had made its first appeal. Milly had brought the news: some people she'd met from the other side of the Hill were trying to organize a theater group. They planned to hire a New York director and to produce serious plays, if only they could arouse enough community interest. Oh, it probably wouldn't amount to much—Milly knew that—but she wondered, shyly, if it might not be fun. April had been disdainful at first: "Oh, God, I know these damn little artsy-craftsy things. There'll be a woman with blue hair and wooden beads who met Max Reinhardt once, and there'll be two or three slightly homosexual young men and seven girls with bad complexions." But then a tasteful advertisement began to appear in the local paper ("We are looking for actors . . ."); then the Wheelers met the people too, at an otherwise boring party, and had to admit that they were what April called "genuine." At Christmastime they met the director himself and agreed with Shep that he did seem like a man who knew what he was doing, and within a month they were all committed. Even Frank, while refusing to try out for a part ("I'd be lousy"), helped write some of the promotional material and got it multigraphed at his office, and it was Frank who talked most hopefully about the larger social and philosophical possibilities of the thing. If a really good, really serious community theater could be established here, wouldn't it be a step in the right direction? God knew they would probably never inspire the Donaldsons—and who cared?—but at least they might give the Donaldsons pause; they might show the Donaldsons a way of life beyond the commuting train and the Republican Party and the barbecue pit. Besides, what did they have to lose?
      Whatever it was, they had lost it now. Blame for the failure of the Laurel Players could hardly be fobbed off on Conformity or The Suburbs or American Society Today. How could new jokes be told about their neighbors when these very neighbors had sat and sweated in their audience? Donaldsons, Cramers, Wingates and all, they had come to The Petrified Forest with a surprisingly generous openness of mind, and had been let down.
      Milly was talking about gardening now, about the difficulty of raising a healthy lawn on Revolutionary Hill, and her eyes were taking on a glaze of panic. Her voice had been the only sound in the room for ten minutes or more, and it had been continuous. She seemed keenly aware of this, but aware too that if she allowed herself to stop the house would fill with a silence as thick as water, an impossibly deep, wide pool in which she would flounder and drown.
      It was Frank who came to her rescue. "Oh, hey listen, Milly. I meant to ask you. Do you know what seecham is? Or beecham? A kind of plant?"
      "Seecham," she repeated, pretending to think, while a blush of gratitude suffused her softening face. "Offhand I'm afraid I don't know, Frank. I can certainly look it up for you, though. We have this book at home."
      "Doesn't really matter, I guess," he said. "It's just that Mrs. Givings came barrel-assing over here yesterday with a big box of this crazy—"
      "Mrs. Givings!" Milly cried in a sudden ecstasy of remembrance and relief. "Oh my goodness, I haven't even  told you people about that! I guess I haven't even told Shep yet, have I, sweetie? About their son? It's fantastic."
      She was off again, but this was a wholly different kind of monologue: everyone was listening. The urgency of her voice and the eager way she leaned forward to tug her skirt down over her wrinkled knees had galvanized them all with the promise of a new theme, and Milly savored the capture of her audience, wanting to let the revelation