Mark André ’s Reviews > Cat on a Hot Tin Roof > Status Update

--almost before you're half-acquainted with life--

sincere as a bird-call blown on a hunter's whistle,

[This speech should have torrential pace and fury.]

BIG DADDY: Ignorance--of mortality--is a comfort. A man don't have that comfort, he's the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows what it is. The others go without knowing, which is the way that anything living should go, go without knowing, without any knowledge of it, and yet a pig squeals, . . .

BIG DADDY: You stood on the wrong side of the moon, it threw your shadow!

[Brick meets his father's hard, intent, grinning stare with a slow, vague smile that he offers all situations from behind the screen of his liquor.]

BIG DADDY [raising his voice]: You ever hear that expression all hawk and no spit? You bring that expression to mind with that little dry cough of yours, all hawk an' no spit....
[The pause is broken only by a short startled laugh from Margaret, the only one there who is conscious of and amused by the grotesque.]

BIG MAMA: Fair or not fair I want to ask you a question, one question---D'you make Brick happy in bed?
MARGARET: Why don't you ask if he makes me happy in bed?
BIG MAMA: Because I know that--
MARGARET: It works both ways!
BIG MAMA: Something's not right! You're childless and my son drinks!

. . . you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated.--You look so cool, . . .

[Margaret, back at the dressing-table, still doesn't see Brick. | He is watching her with a look that is not quite definable--Amused? shocked? contemptuous?--part of those and part of something else.]