“Yeah?”
“Ain’t you gonna give me hell?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, George.” Smiling. The kind of smile that saysYeah, I know I’m a dope, but we both know I can’t help it.Sitting down beside George on the imaginary riverbank. Taking off his own hat, tossing it aside, rumpling his short blond hair. Imitating George’s voice. Mike had nailed this with eerie ease in the very first rehearsal, with no help from me. “?‘If I was alone, I could live so easy. I could get a job and not have no more mess.’?” Resuming his own voice… or Lennie’s, rather. “I can go away. I can go right up in the hills and find a cave, if you don’t want me.”
Vince Knowles lowered his head, and when he raised it and spoke his next line, his voice was thick and hitching. It was a simulacrum of sorrow he’d never approached in even his best rehearsals. “No, Lennie, I want you to stay here with me.”
“Then tell me like you done before! Bout other guys, and about us!”
That was when I heard the first low sob from the audience. It was followed by another. Then a third. This I had not expected, not in my wildest dreams. A chill raced up my back, and I stole a glance at Mimi. She wasn’t crying yet, but the liquid sheen in her eyes told me that she soon would be. Yes, even her—hard old baby that she was.
George hesitated, then took hold of Lennie’s hand, a thing Vince never would have done in rehearsals.That’s queerboy stuff,he would have said.
“Guys like us… Lennie, guys like us got no families. They got nobody that gives a hoot in hell about them.” Touching the prop gun hidden under his coat with his other hand. Taking it partway out. Putting it back. Then steeling himself and taking it all the way out. Laying it along his leg.
“But not us, George! Not us! Idn’t that right?”
Mike was gone. The stage was gone. Now it was only the two of them, and by the time Lennie was asking George to tell him about the little ranch, and the rabbits, and living off the fat of the land, half the audience was weeping audibly. Vince was crying so hard he could hardly deliver his final lines, telling poor stupid Lennie to look over there, the ranch they were going to live on was over there. If he looked hard enough, he could see it.
The stage lensed slowly to full dark, Cindy McComas for once running the lights perfectly. Birdie Jamieson, the school janitor, fired a blank cartridge. Some woman in the audience gave a little scream. That sort of reaction is usually followed by nervous laughter, but tonight there was only the sound of people weeping in their seats. Otherwise, silence. It went on for ten seconds. Or maybe it was only five. Whatever it was, to me it seemed forever. Then the applause broke. It was the best thunder I ever heard in my life. The house lights went up. The entire audience was on its feet. The front two rows were reserved for faculty, and I happened to glance at Coach Borman. Damned if he wasn’t crying, too.
Two rows back, where all the school jocks were sitting together, Jim LaDue leaped to his feet.“You rock, Coslaw!”he shouted. This elicited cheers and laughter.
The cast came out to take their bows: first the football-player townspeople, then Curley and Curley’s Wife, then Candy and Slim and the rest of the farmhands. The applause started to die a little and then Vince came out, flushed and happy, his own cheeks stillwet. Mike Coslaw came last, shuffling as if embarrassed, then looking out in comical amazement as Mimi shouted “Bravo!”
Others echoed it, and soon the auditorium resounded with it:Bravo, Bravo, Bravo. Mike bowed, sweeping his hat so low it brushed the stage. When he stood again, he was smiling. But it was more than a smile; his face was transformed with the happiness that’s reserved for those who are finally allowed to reach all the way up.
Then he shouted, “Mr. Amberson! Come up here, Mr. Amberson!”
The cast took up the chant of “Director! Director!”
“Don’t kill the applause,” Mimi growled from beside me. “Get up there, you goofball!”
So I did, and the applause swelled again. Mike grabbed me, hugged me, lifted me off my feet, then set me down and gave me a hearty smack on the cheek. Everyone laughed, including me. We all grabbed hands, lifted them to the audience, and bowed. As I listened to the applause, a thought occurred to me, one that darkened my heart. In Minsk, there were newlyweds. Lee and Marina had been man and wife for exactly nineteen days.
5
Three weeks later, just before school let out for the summer, I went to Dallas to take some photographs of the three apartments where Lee and Marina would live together. I used a small Minox, holding it in the palm of my hand and allowing the lens to peep out between two spread fingers. I felt ridiculous—more like the trench-coated caricatures inMadmagazine’sSpy vs Spyfeature than James Bond—but I had learned to be careful about such things.
When I returned to my house, Mimi Corcoran’s sky-blue Nash Rambler was parked at the curb and Mimi was just sliding in behind the wheel. When she saw me, she got out again. A brief grimace tightened her face—pain or effort—but when she came up the drive, she was wearing her usual dry smile. As if I amusedher, but in a good way. In her hands she was carrying a bulky manila envelope, which contained the hundred and fifty pages ofThe Murder Place.I’d finally given in to her pesterings… but that had been only the day before.
“Either you liked it one hell of a lot, or you never got past page ten,” I said, taking the envelope. “Which was it?”
Her smile now looked enigmatic as well as amused. “Like most librarians, I’m a fast reader. Can we go inside and talk about it? It isn’t even the middle of June, and it’s already so hot.”
Yes, and she was sweating, something I’d never seen before. Also, she looked as if she’d lost weight. Not a good thing for a lady who had no pounds to give away.
Sitting in my living room with big glasses of iced coffee—me in the easy chair, she on the couch—Mimi gave her opinion. “I enjoyed the stuff about the killer dressed up as a clown. Call me twisted, but I found that deliciously creepy.”
“If you’re twisted, I am, too.”
She smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find a publisher for it. On the whole, I liked it very much.”
I felt a little hurt.The Murder Placemight have begun as camouflage, but it had become more important to me as I got deeper into it. It was like a secret memoir. One of the nerves. “That ‘on the whole’ stuff reminds me of Alexander Pope—you know, damning with faint praise?”
“I didn’t quite mean it that way.” More qualification. “It’s just that… goddammit, George, this isn’t what you were meant to do. You were meant to teach. And if you publish a book like this, no school department in the United States will hire you.” She paused. “Except maybe in Massachusetts.”
