June Moon

Foreword

In the year 1898 there were 201 fatal street accidents in the city of New York. Of these, eighty-eight were caused by horse vehicles and 113 by streetcars. In the latter total are included people who died of old age while waiting for cars that were not labelled “Car Barn Only.” The following year brought the automobile to America’s metropolis and the statistics attribute one fatality to its arrival, as against 103 deaths by horse vehicles and 167 by streetcars. It was not until 1913 that the automobile forged to the front as a lethal weapon, never again to be headed. After 1918 the horses and streetcars virtually gave up trying, and the figures for last year show that the thing has ceased to be a contest and become a joke—1,075 deaths by autos, 64 by streetcars and 14 by horse vehicles.

It is estimated that if the horse vehicles and streetcars had kept on fighting and maintained their early leadership over automobiles, by the year 1970 the entire population of New York City would have been wiped out and no harm done.

The World Almanac, from which this information was gleaned, gives us only one ray of hope. In New York’s biggest borough, Brooklyn, there were a thousand fewer births and thirteen hundred more death in 1928 than in 1927. It may also comfort some folks to know that only fifty thousand more New Yorkers speak Yiddish and Hebrew than English and Celtic.

Dramatis Personae

• Fred Stevens

• Edna Baker

• Paul Sears

• Lucille

• Eileen

• Maxie Schwartz

• Goldie

• A Window Cleaner

• A Man Named Brainard

• Benny Fox

• Mr. Hart

• Miss Rixey

Prologue

The scene is a section of a parlor car speeding toward New York, and not so very far from it when the curtain rises. We see only two chairs clearly; the ends of the car dissolve in shadows. On these less visible chairs are tossed vague overcoats and magazines; the racks above them are filled with baggage. There is a bag or two overhead; on the floor are quantities of Sunday newspapers, along with plenty of rotogravure sections, curling carelessly against the bottoms of the chairs. It is night, and the shades are down.

In the two vital chairs sit a boy and a girl. The name of the boy, as we presently find out, is Fred Stevens. The girl is Edna Baker. She sits with her back to him, and is absorbed in a magazine when the curtain goes up. The boy, who is not exactly a literary type, is a bit restless. He wriggles in his seat, sighs, peers discreetly at the girl, who pays no attention. With a bit too much of a flourish, as though he thus hoped to attract her attention, he whips out a time table and studies it. Consults his watch; swings and peers out of the window, hand cupped over eyes to exclude the light. Then he swings back, relaxes—and looks toward the girl again. She swings her chair around for a second; peers down the aisle, but swings back without having permitted the boy to catch her eye. He rattles his newspaper a trifle obviously; indulges in a bit of bad whistling; hums a little. She swings around again; another look down the aisle. Fred girds up his courage to break the ice. The girl, who has the situation well in hand, gives sudden and demure attention to an imaginary spot on her dress. She chips at it with a fingernail.

Act I

The scene is one of those Riverside Drive apartments, in a place called New York City. It is up in the neighborhood of One Hundred and Sixteenth Street, and once it was pretty good. It’s a bit run down now, and since people began moving to the East Side the neighborhood has become somewhat déclassé—not more so, however, than Paul Sears, the tenant of this particular apartment.

We see the living-room, if you can call it living. There is a piano, because Paul Sears is a composer. The rest of the furniture is what you might imagine, or worse.

Paul, a commonplace-looking man in his middle thirties, is at the piano when the curtain rises. He is in his shirt sleeves and is alternately hitting a few discouraged keys and making probably meaningless notations on the music sheet in front of him. He lacks one finger of being a two-fingered piano player. He is laboriously going over the same phrase again and again. And if you had never even heard it once, it would be too often.

Lucille, his wife, comes on from the rear rooms of the apartment. A spare but still attractive woman, on whom three years of marriage with Paul Sears have left their mark. She looks around for something. Finds it. It turns out to be a copy of the Graphic. She drops listlessly into a chair and starts to read. Paul continues torturing the piano.