“My nice creature, when people are so famous they experience loneliness because they are quite shut away from those who are quite famous, they cannot exist on work no matter in what line their talent may be—nor on lollipop praise of the public nor carping criticisms. They must have an antidote. Yet they cannot sacrifice their relentless system of life which takes a first mortgage on their time and energy. So while you hear of us as having huge poultry farms and see our pictures taken in the act of garroting a red pepper from Madame So and So’s truck farm where she spends most of her time when not—and so on, or read an interview in which one of us declares a submarine boat to be our favorite siesta spot, please know it is not true. But throughout the years of endless work and surrender of the mystical force constituting genius, we have just to be children—and pretend. There, that is the whole thing in a nutshell—pretend just as children fancy themselves policemen, motormen, kings and fairy queens all the while swallowing the mortification of domineering nurses and bibs. We live with our memories, many times, if they are pleasant. How rich a confession Caleb could wring out of us, if he were not so sluggish! We dream-play, fancy, create a world within a world. Bliss Hobart in a fit of cynicism—I noticed he began taking pepsin the following week—named it ‘the ooze’—and it became our trade name for it. The ooze, the unreal, really unimportant and absurd, yet ready to be lived with and yet to vanish, the state of mind which we people as we wish and live house-and-garden lives for as much as half an hour at a time! You may not give this credence, but it is quite as real as my piano or Collin’s brush. And heaven grant you won’t need the ooze, Thurley, for a little! Still, it is a lovely, plastic state of thought—like those lavender and gold butterflies you find lingering in the corners of Whistler’s paintings or that flutter in the margins of special editions.”
“Why don’t you have the—the ooze be real—live a fifty-fifty sort of existence?” Thurley borrowed Dan’s slang.
“It would be like blending chilblains and poetry or mosquitoes and mahogany—impossible! That is why they say all genius is a trifle mad. Remember, the ooze is your best friend! Why, after a fatiguing concert, I’ve played I was the bustling, happy mother of half a dozen youngsters, the type of American housewife who does all her work except the washing and whose hands grow red and hardened yet are sparkling with diamonds, whose children grow up and adore her—I’ve lived in a red brick house with those diamond-shaped panes at the front windows and dotted muslin curtains criss-crossed—you know—and I’ve entertained bridge clubs galore, making mayonnaise and maple parfait myself while the baby was napping—” and when Thurley had clamored for a clearer understanding, Ernestine ordered her off to study her French and forget she shared the secret of the “ooze.”
“What is Bliss Hobart’s ooze?” she had insisted.
“I think he plays he runs an ice cream soda fountain in Harlem,” Ernestine had answered to be rid of her. At the time Thurley had seriously questioned Ernestine’s sanity.
But this snowy December night the ooze became very real to her and, unknowingly, Thurley passed a telling boundary line of progress. She dreamed on of Birge’s Corners—she saw the Christmas entertainment taking place. There was the awful make-believe chimney which the Sunday-school superintendent, invariably the thinnest man in town, was to descend, fragments of his cotton beard floating about the stage after the feat was accomplished. She could see the primary class waving the red satin banner symbolic of the best attendance—strange, how excellent is the Sunday-school attendance during holiday season—and then marching on the stage to sing in a series of mouse-like squeaks, “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” while their teacher, in love with Jo Drummer, the Santa Claus, stood below to direct them and wonder if Jo was properly impressed with her maternal devotion and her new hat.
Then the minister “delivered” a few remarks and Lorraine came on the stage to hand out tarlatan stockings with nuts and hard candies which accompanied the gifts. After laborious recitations by tortured boys with slicked-back hair and freckles pale because of the excitement, the town elocutionist let loose with “How They Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent” or “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and about at this juncture the stage chimney would crash down and reveal the truth—it was nothing but a lot of brick-paper pasted on Dan Birge’s store boxes!
Well, it was fun to play that one was taking part in the entertainment and showing off a little, as every one else did, including the minister, to smell, in imagination, the pines and evergreens and to visualize Dan Birge, the handsomest lad in the assemblage, winking at her during the minister’s address!
The river wind swept in through the lowered taxicab window-pane and Thurley leaned forward to say, “Home, please”—the ooze drifting obediently away. She was Thurley Precore, the Thurley with rejected Christmas gifts and the prospect of a hotel holiday dinner in company with Miss Clergy who would nap most of the day!
Yet the ooze had stimulated Thurley; she could always go slipping back to the Corners to relive the homey things which had made her a wild rose. It appeared to be tremendously comforting and she went a step further in self-analysis, telling herself, as she was going up to the hotel rooms, that the thing which made great people lapse into the ooze for tangled up nerves and snarly frames of mind was the thing which made sarcastic, aloof Ernestine Christian play a gypsy dance with the wild fire its author intended it to have or gave Caleb the power to invent an entirely new setting for the same old, “Will you love me?” or told Collin how to forget the ingrowing chin of his subject and make it strong and masterful still looking like the ingrowing original—here, Thurley took the lesson home for she, too, was crystallizing her personality. It gave Thurley the ability to feel that she was Juliet in the tomb or Rosina having that delightful music lesson with her masquerading lover, it was temperament, psychic masquerading! There, that was a much nicer name than the ooze and when she was famous enough she would tell Bliss Hobart so and make him admit his clumsiness of nomenclature.