Summary
After Ruth leaves, Teddy watches her out the window. He does not notice Lenny behind him. When Teddy turns around they say hello. Teddy asks if he woke Lenny up, and Lenny replies that he had an early night and can’t sleep. Teddy wonders why and Lenny shrugs that he is restless because there is a ticking that keeps him up. Teddy suggests it is a clock and Lenny says it could be and he ought to do something about it.
They exchange bland comments about the “old man” and Teddy sleeping in his old room. Lenny says there are sheets in sideboard of the room. Teddy carries his bags up and they agree to see each at breakfast.
It is silent and dark. Lenny brings a clock with him into the main room and sits staring at it and smokes.
Ruth enters and Lenny smiles at her. They politely exchange names. She declines when he asks if she wants a refreshment. He is glad because they don’t have any anyway. He muses that she must be connected with his brother, to which she replies that she is his wife.
Lenny changes the subject to his clock, talking at length about how it ticks and how many things tick. Objects seem commonplace during the day, though, so maybe it wasn’t this clock. He gets up and pours her a glass of water.
Looking at her, he comments that it is funny that she is fully dressed and he has pajamas on. He then says it is funny to see his brother Teddy again and that their father will be pleased. He is surprised, though, since he thought Teddy was in America.
Ruth explains that they are visiting. Lenny looks surprised and asks if she lives with him. She replies that she is his wife. When she says they came from Italy he asks about it. Ruth replies that they were in Venice and Lenny says if he’d been in the Italian Campaign he probably would have found himself there.
Lenny stands and walks over to Ruth. He asks if he can hold her hand and when she asks why he says he will tell her. He begins a story of how one night he was alone down by the docks. A woman came up to him with a proposal. Normally he would have acquiesced but she was dying of the pox. She was insistent and tried to take liberties with him. He hit her and he thought he should kill her. The circumstances were right. Her chauffeur never would have said anything. However, he decided not to bother and just hit her again on the nose and kicked her with his boot.
Ruth simply asks how he knew she was diseased. He pauses and says he decided she was. He then asks how long they have been married. After hearing six years, he says the family is proud of Teddy as a Doctor of Philosophy. Teddy is sensitive, though, and Lenny wishes he was as well.
Ruth inquires if that is the case, and Lenny speaks of how he may be sensitive to atmosphere but tends “to get desensitized, if you know what I mean, when people make unreasonable demands on me” (32). He tells a story of how last Christmas they got a heavy snowstorm and he loved being out in the crisp cold air. One day he was drinking tea at a café when an old woman came in asking for help with her iron mangle. Her brother-in-law had left it in the wrong room and it was too heavy for her to lift. Lenny decided to help because she lived nearby but once he got there he realized the mangle was too heavy for him as well. He became annoyed and told the woman to shove it up her ass. He hit her in the stomach and left.
Lenny interrupts his story and asks if he should move the ashtray out of Ruth’s way. She replies it is not in her way. He clarifies, saying that his father is obsessed with order. He reaches for her glass and tells her she has had enough. She replies, using his name Leonard, that in her opinion she has not. He asks her not to call him that.
When she refuses he says he will take her if he can’t take the glass. When she replies that she might take him, he is confused. He complains that Teddy has had a secret liaison with her and brought her here and now she is making trouble.
She lifts her glass and tells him to take a sip. She pats her lap and tells him to open his mouth. She then says for him to lie on the floor and she will pour it down his throat. Disconcerted, Lenny asks if that is some sort of proposal.
She laughs and goes upstairs. The perplexed and disconcerted Lenny shouts after her, asking if that was some kind of proposal.
Max comes downstairs and yells at Lenny for being loud. Lenny says he was just thinking aloud. Max starts talking about how Lenny is rude and loud and wants an explanation.
Lenny turns to his father and asks what the night was like when Max and Jessie conceived him. Was he in mind, or was he the last thing they had in mind? Lots of people, he claims, think about this. They want the image of what it was like.
Max grumbles that Lenny will drown in his own blood. Lenny tells him he can write his answer. He adds he should have asked his mother. Max spits at him and goes upstairs. The next morning Joey does limbering exercises in front of the mirror. Max enters and states that he hates this room. He prefers the kitchen but can't be in there because his brother is always in there washing things.
Max then asks Joey if he wants to go to a football game with him but Joey says he has to do rounds. Max yells for Sam, who enters the room holding a cloth. Max spits out that Sam resents making his breakfast and that he wants Sam to get rid of all the feelings of resentment he holds against him. He does not understand them; after Dad died Sam told Max to look after his brothers. Sam retorts that he could not say that after he was dead. Max, with a withering look, says it was right before. He turns to Joey and says Sam will stop at nothing and even criticizes his own father. He was a bad son and even MacGregor did better in the butcher shop. Max always worked hard and had three grown men. Sam looks at him and gives him the cloth.
Ruth and Teddy enter, both wearing dressing gowns. Teddy smiles and says they overslept and wants to know what is for breakfast. Stunned, Max turns to Sam and Joey and asks if they knew he was here. He becomes frustrated and asks who knew. He then asks how long they've been there, and who let Teddy bring a tart into the house.
Teddy tries to interject and Max complains “We’ve had a smelly scrubber in my house all night. We’ve had a stinking pox-ridden slut in my house all night” (41). Teddy crossly replies that Ruth is his wife.
Max says they’ve never had a whore under this roof. Joey and Lenny never brought any home. He tells Teddy to take her away. He then tells Joey to do it, and Joey sheepishly calls him an old man.
Lenny enters. Max punches Joey, who staggers across the room. With this blow Max begins to collapse and Sam tries to help. Max hits Sam with his stick. Joey sinks in front of Ruth, who looks down at him. Joey then stands, as does Max. Everyone looks at each other.
Max walks over to Ruth and asks if she is a mother. She replies that she has three children. Max turns to Teddy and asks if they’re all his. He then teases him, asking if he wants a cuddle and a kiss from his old father. Teddy steps forward and says he is ready. Max laughs and announces that Teddy still loves his father.
Analysis
The second part of this first act features more inscrutable conversations between family members to which the audience must pay very careful attention, lest they find themselves even further from whatever message Pinter wishes to impart.
One of the most conspicuous themes of the text is the desire to know, to define and/or impose meaning. Both Max and Lenny demonstrate a desire for knowledge (Teddy as philosopher will be dealt with in the next section) but this is not academic knowledge or anything of the intellectual sort; rather, it is the sort of knowledge that implies understanding how and why people do what they do and how one can assert dominance over them. Max’s knowledge is more tangible, more instinctual. He has an innate awareness of animals and claims he can smell a good horse; at the end of the play he thinks he can “smell” something problematic about Ruth which could mean that he instinctively realizes she is not going to do what she says she will. Lenny also desires knowledge, but as critic John Warner writes, Lenny’s knowledge “remains abstract, in some ways unreal.” While he and Max and even Ruth are “obsessed with the question of knowing, of how reality is perceived” Lenny's way of relating to things is more subjective. Warner explains that the prostitute’s disease “is not something to be scientifically or objectively verified; rather it is reality imparted by his mind. What attracts Ruth is not his callous brutality but this capacity for subjective awareness in contrast to her husband’s apparently sterile objectivity.” Lenny is an armchair philosopher, plaguing Teddy with spiritual questions and his father with questions about his conception. In the latter, he seems to earnestly desire to know that man is more than mechanistic impulses and possesses “an inner dissatisfaction with his own way of knowing reality and the search for something else.”
In the aforementioned conversation between Lenny and Ruth, we begin to see Ruth developing as the central character of the play. When we first meet her, she is still, quiet, and unruffled by Teddy’s fidgety energy. She manages to procure the key to the house from him, a quietly symbolic act that foreshadows her eventual assumption of power, but it is still rather surprising when her stoic, passive demeanor shifts to one of aggression when talking with Lenny. First she refuses to be intimidated by his description of wanting to kill the prostitute, simply asking how he knew she was diseased. Then she refuses to let him take her glass, tells him she will take him when he says he will take her, and tells him to lie down so she can pour the liquid down his throat.
Lenny sees this as an aggressive proposal, which it is: Ruth is simply giving Lenny what he gave her. Critic Michael Hinden writes about these proposals, noting that “it is [Lenny] who makes proposals in the play, while Max simply interrogates. Lenny, a pimp by trade, jealously guards his power to make propositions but heartily resents being made the object of them.” Lenny makes his propositions to Ruth as a display of power because “the power to propose, to impose meaning, is the mark of human desire in its strongest phase.” Ruth usurps his power in a both subtle and overt fashion.
One more note about Lenny’s speech. It is not clear whether or not Lenny actually did what he said he did with the prostitute, or with the old lady; however, that does not matter. What Lenny is doing is performing. Critic Bert States writes, “the main thing is the conception and framing of the possibility, the something done to the brutality that counts. The genial minimization of it, you might say” and “life is all performance for Lenny, a veritable charade of politesse.” He uses pseudo-genteel language and methodic rhythm in his speech to convey authority and menace in the most passive and casual way.
Ruth also refuses to let Max cow her with his snarling accusations of being a tart and a slut (ironic, since later he will want her to be just that). She says nothing in response and answers his question about children in a straightforward, emotionless fashion.
What is happening with father and son, then, is what critic Norman Berlin notes: “Ruth enters a house full of men—two of them, Max and Lenny, hateful misogynists—and she takes it over by means of her sexuality.” These two men in particular want to exercise their dominance but Ruth begins to show them that this will not happen, and by the end of the poem she has consolidated her power.
