Three Days of Rain
By Richard GreenbergWalker has been missing for the past few years. He did not return for his father's funeral. He has returned to his father's old apartment. He greets the audience. His parents are Ned and Lina. His sister (the sane one in the family) is Nan. He also mentions his father's partner, Theo, and Theo's son, Pip.
WALKER:
Meanwhile, back in the city... Two nights of insomnia. In this room, in the dark... listening... soaking up the Stravinsky of it... No end to the sounds in a city... Something happens somwehere, makes a noise, the noise travels, charts the distance: The Story of a Moment.
God, I need to sleep!
My name is Walker Janeway. I'm the son of Edmund Janeway, whose slightly premature death caused such a stir last year, I'm told.
As you're probably aware, my father, along with that tribe of acolytes who continue to people the firm of Wexler Janeway, designed all - yes, all - of the most famous buildings of the last thirty years. You've seen their pictures, you may have even visited a few. That Shi'ite Mosque in Idaho. The new library in Bruges. The crafts museum in Austin, that hospice I forget where, and a vertical mall in Rhode Island that in square footage axtually exceeds the state of Rhode Island.
Years and years and years ago, with his late partner, Theodore Wexler, my father also designed three or four buildings that truly are distinguished, chief among them: Janeway House.
I know you know that one.
Everyone's seen that one picture, LIFE Magazine, April of '63, I think, where it looks lunar, I mean, like something carved from the moon, mirage-y - you remember that photo? It's beautiful isn't it? It won some kind of non-Pulitzer Prize that year. People have sometimes declined my invitation to see the real place for ruining the experience of the photograph.
Well. The real place, as it happens, is a private home out in the desirable part of Long Island. My grandparents commissioned it from my father, using all the money they had in the world, because, I guess, they loved him so much. Apparently, there was something for a parent to love. Hard to imagine how they could tell, though, since he seldom actually spoke. Maybe he was lovable in a Chaplinesque way. Whatever, their faith paid off. The house is now deemed, by those who matter, to be one of the great private residences of the last half-century.
It's empty now.
My sister and I will inherit it today.
We'll be the only family present. Unless you count our friend, Pip, who is my late father's late partner's torpid son.
My mother would be with us, too, of course, but she's, um, like, well, she's sort of like Zelda Fitzgerald's less stable sister, so she can't be there. She's elsewhere, she's...
So, then, this is the story as I know it so far:
My father was more-or-less silent; my mother was more-or-less mad. They married because by 1960 they had reached a certain age and they were the last ones left in the room.
And then they had my sister who is somehow entirely sane.
And then they had me.
And my father became spectacularly successful, and his partner died shockingly young, and my mother grew increasingly mad, and my sister and I were there, so we had to grow up.
And today we receive our legacy.
In this monologue, Walker discusses with his sister, Nan, his father's decaying journal which he has recently discovered.
WALKER:
It really is the most extraordinary document. The first thing you notice when you start reading is the style: It doesn't have one. And it manages to sustain that for hundreds of pages - you flip through - narratives of the most wrenching events, and the affect is entirely flat - wait - listen to this - winter of 1966 - you know, when Theo is going under?
Listen to our father's rendering:
"January 3 - Theo is dying."
"January 5 - Theo is dying."
"January 18 - Theo dead."I mean, his partner! Best and oldest friend: "Theo dying, Theo dying, Theo dead." You could sing it to the tune of "Ob-La-Di."
And it's all like that. Every entry. Years and years of - wait - this is the best of all - the first note - the kickoff, you'll - listen:
"1960, April 3rd to April 5th - Three days of rain."
Okay. Look. Let's...
Reconstruct along with me for a moment. You are this young man. Ambitious, of course - what architect isn't ambitious? And it's that moment when you're so bursting with feeling that people aren't enough, your art isn't enough, you need something else, some other way to let out everything that's in you. You buy this notebook, this volume into which you can pour your most secret, your deepest and illicit passions. You bring it home, commence - the first sacred jottings - the feelings you couldn't contain:
"April 3rd to April 5th: Three days of rain." A weather report. A fucking weather report!
(Pause.) You know, the thing with people who never talk, the thing is you always suppose they're harboring some enormous secret. But, just possibly, the secret is, they have absolutely nothing to say.
This monologue immediately follows the previous one. They can be performed together or separately.
WALKER:
Anyway, I want you to give me the house. I want the house. I want to buy your share. I need it. I don't live anywhere.
Oh, look, look, I can't be sure of this but I think when I got lost this last time, when I disappeared, it was so that you would find me. I know that makes me an impossible person, I am an impossible person, it's fact, but, anyway, when all those months passed and no one showed up, I started to believe you had forgotten me. I don't mean as in "ceased to care," I mean as in, "couldn't place the name." That's absurd, but I was living in a country where I didn't speak the language, and it started to seem truly possible. Crazy - but that's not exactly foreign terrain for us, is it? I really started to belive I was going - crazy -
The reason I don't like being around people who are like me only old is that they always seem to be ending badly. And I don't want to be this burden on people I love so much. And the house is very beautiful. I think it could only have been designed by someone who was happy. And I'd like to believe that was part of it, too. I love the city, but it's dangerous to me. It's let me... become nothing. I want to be sane. I want a place that belongs to me. Let me have the house. Please.
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