You Might As Well Die Read Online Free

Dorothy had left off. “Ernie wasn’t a deep thinker, that’s true. But afraid to wake up and greet the world? I think not. You all know what he was like. He was full of energy. Always bugging anyone who could help him for a leg up. Always had another idea he was working on.”
    “Maybe this was simply his last idea,” Kaufman said morosely.
    Dorothy shook her head. “No. Neysa hit the nail on the head. MacGuffin wasn’t a misunderstood genius, nor was he a dope at the end of his rope. When he last talked to me, he seemed—I don’t know— excited by the idea.”
    “Could it be,” Sherwood asked, “that he was so fixated on the idea of fame and notoriety that he killed himself to achieve it?”
    “I don’t think so,” Neysa said. “Success seemed like the thing he wanted most in this life, not in the next. What good is success if you’re not alive to enjoy it?”
    “Exactly,” Dorothy said.
    “Pshaw!” Woollcott fluttered his hands. “A fool like MacGuffin? Suicide is the ultimate selfish act, and MacGuffin was a self-absorbed nincompoop. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that he would take the coward’s way out. It makes perfect sense to me.”
    “I don’t know,” Dorothy said. “It takes more than a coward to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.”
    Franklin Pierce Adams, the elder statesman of the group, spoke contemplatively from behind his cigar. “Can you please read his note again?”
    Dorothy simply handed it to Adams, and he read it aloud. “‘Then the world will know I’m not a hack. A new and better life awaits me. Good-bye, cruel world,’” Adams finished.
    Woollcott wiped jelly from his mouth and sneered, “He writes like a melodramatic teenage girl.”
    “Takes one to know one,” Dorothy said.
    Woollcott frowned. “Highly amusing. You should submit that riposte to a suitably intellectual journal, such as Boys’ Life . That aside, all that young fellow MacGuffin needed was a healthy outlet for his energy, such as a dose of vigorous exercise. Would have perked him right up.”
    Everyone looked skeptically at Woollcott, who was notoriously—almost proudly—as fat and round as an overfed baby.
    “And what would you know about exercise?” Dorothy asked. She was still annoyed by his comment that suicide is the ultimate selfish act .
    “I know everything about exercise. I’m madly taken with it.” Woollcott beamed through another mouthful of jelly tart. “I’m disappointed that no one here has noticed the phenomenal changes in my physique, all thanks to healthy exercise. My spirits are soaring. My skin is pink and glowing. My weight is down. My appetite is up.”
    “Haven’t noticed any change in your healthy appetite,” Dorothy said. “And none of those other changes you mentioned either.”
    “Aleck,” Sherwood jeered. “The only exercise you get is exercising your right to free speech.”
    Adams asked, “What sort of healthy exercise are you talking about? Skewering playwrights? Elbowing out old ladies at Macy’s?”
    Woollcott laid his hands on the table and pronounced, “Croquet.”
    They all laughed.
    “Croquet is not exercise,” Adams declared. “It’s puttering in the yard wearing a bad sweater.”
    “Croquet is just an excuse to wander around the lawn drinking gin and lemonade,” said Marc Connelly, who was Kaufman’s writing partner.
    “Croquet requires all the physical exertion of a game of checkers,” Dorothy said.
    Woollcott sneered, “Not the way we play.”
    “ We? We who?” Adams said.
    “Harpo Marx and I.”
    Again they all laughed.
    “You can’t play croquet with Harpo,” Dorothy said. “That’s not a game. It’s a circus.”
    Harold Ross, another member of the Round Table, came rushing into the dining room, followed by Benchley.
    “Big news, everyone,” Ross exclaimed. “Raoul Fleischmann had a great second quarter in the baking business. So he’s finally going through with the loan. My magazine for New Yorkers is officially