There was only one table read on the schedule, and even that, I think, was for my benefit. They’d been cooling their heels in Michigan waiting for the new Emily and now that I was there they were ready to work. Duke was out of his chair the minute I came into the rehearsal room, guiding me around the table like it was a cocktail party. “Emily,” he said, “this is your mother, Mrs. Webb, and your brother Wally.” He leaned over and gave the woman who would play his wife a fleeting kiss on the temple. Mrs. Webb was faded and soft, old enough to be my mother had my mother started young, which she would have in Grover’s Corners.
“How do,” Wally Webb said, and offered his hand. He was an actual child, maybe ten or eleven, with straight brown hair and freckles, though the girl playing Rebecca Gibbs was probably sixteen and got the part for being small. I met Doc Gibbs and Mrs. Gibbs and George. Georges were bound to disappoint me, and this one was no exception. He was a good-looking guy with a string of Pizza Hut commercials and a Saturday morning Disney show that was about to be cancelled. Instead of trying to hold my eye, he lifted himself halfway from his chair and halfway shook my hand.
Uncle Wallace though, he was another story. He leapt to his feet and planted both hands on my shoulders. “Look at you!” he cried. “Look at our Emily! Thank god you’re here. I’m going to have to hug you.”
Hugged by Uncle Wallace! Oh, but I had loved him as a child. The gruff and tender caregiver of his sister’s orphaned brood. The carefree bachelor, dashing in middle age, had risen to the challenge, leaving children all across America to wonderhow much better their lives might be if only their parents were dead.
Uncle Wallace put a rinse on his hair to keep it in the neighborhood of red, and his face had the slightly pulled-back quality I’d come to accept in women when I was in California but still found disconcerting in men. He pressed me to him a beat too long.
“This is Uncle Wallace’s eleventh production as the Stage Manager,” Duke said. “He’s hot off a smash success at a dinner theater in Tempe.”
“I can do it in my sleep,” Uncle Wallace said, giving me a wink. I would have laughed had Duke not squeezed my upper arm, moving me along to meet Constable Warren and Howie Newsome and Mrs. Soames. The smaller parts went to people in the community, a strategy that resulted in good will and unexpected fund-raising opportunities. I liked Duke for taking every bit as long introducing me to one cast member as another. Apart from Uncle Wallace, none of us were famous, after all. We were on the way up or on the way out. Our audience for the table read was a collection of swings and understudies who sat at the far end of the room with their pens and scripts. The actual stage manager, as opposed to the actor playing the Stage Manager, sat with the assistant stage manager. I waved to them collectively and they waved back.
“We should get going,” one of the men at the table said patiently.
“Andthisis our esteemed director, Mr. Nelson,” Duke said, holding out his hand. “Our fearless leader. He’s the one who has no business being here.”
“But here I am,” Mr. Nelson said.
“I can’t remember when I last worked with a real director,” Uncle Wallace said, pitching to the room. “There’s always a director, of course, or someone claiming to be a director even though they have no interest in your performance. But not thisone! Nelson is a man of ideas, of insight. I thought I knew everything about the part, but he’s opened it up for me again, invited me into the very soul of the Stage Manager.” Uncle Wallace turned to me. “Makes it feel like my first time.”
George picked up his script and tapped it on the edge of the table like maybe he was thinking about leaving.
“Drinking,” Duke whispered as we took our places at the table.
“I’m afraid I already gave my terrific introductory speech last week,” Nelson said to me. “Went over the themes we were highlighting. I don’t want to make the rest of the company listen to it twice.”
“We loved it!” Uncle Wallace said. “We’d be happy to hear it again.”
Nelson shook his head. “Let’s go ahead and read through. Lara, I’d be more than happy to catch you up later if you’d like. I’ve been told you know what you’re doing.”
I looked at the director and smiled. I was ready.
I was sixteen when I installedOur Towninto my brain, back when my brain was spongy and fresh and capable of holding on to things forever. Thanks to all those nights in Jimmy-George’s car, I could recite George’s lines as easily as Emily’s, and if I didn’t think about it too much I probably could do the other parts as well. Maybe not all of the Stage Manager, but most of it.Three years have gone by. Yes, the sun’s come up over a thousand times. At not quite twenty-five, this would be my third production of the play. I kept the script on my nightstand to read when I woke up in the middle of the night. I’d spoken the lines over traffic while driving Ripley’s MG down the Santa Monica freeway to spend the day at the beach with friends. I ran scenes in my head on the plane going out to New York, on the plane coming to Michigan. I repeated the words like Catholic girls with their rosary beads, clicking through Hail Marys until they were muscle memory. So it was easy for me to be there in Tom Lake, to be Emily again, tobe myself. I had enough room in my brain to think about work and wonder about Duke at the same time.
Having known him for all of an hour, I assumed Duke would be a ham, but his Editor Webb was perfectly restrained, a dignified, matter-of-fact man, even when he had to say words likeSatiddy, likker. It’s hard not to make hash of those things, but Duke was the kind of natural Ripley would have liked. Not only was he natural, he remained present for the whole reading, unlike George, who managed to check out the very instant his lips stopped moving. Duke paid attention to the other actors, and I flattered myself by imagining he paid the most attention to me.
If it was my gift to play younger, Duke came off older than he was. He was twenty-eight that summer, but as my father, anyone would have thought he was on the other side of forty. Over the course of his career, Duke played older, then for a stretch he played his age, then he played younger, all the while staying in the same exact place. I never knew how he pulled that off.
It hadn’t occurred to me until we started reading the funeral scene that I was now the age of Emily in the third act, and that no matter how young I looked, I would age out of the part in time because time was unavoidable. I thought of all those women dressed as girls who’d showed up to audition at my high school. No one gets to go on playing Emily forever. That’s what I was thinking at the table read, how I would lose her.
I said my lines with my script closed. I thought that Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb were teary, though their voices held. Even George, who doesn’t have a line of dialogue in the third act, turned to look at me. If this was going to be my last time in the part, I was, as Veronica would say, going to kill it. Plus, I held out a flickering hope that if I did my very best work at Tom Lake, word would get back to New York, and that the Emily they’d chosen for the Spalding Gray production would be gently done away with, and even after this I’d have the chance to play her one more time.
When we finished, Mr. Nelson smiled. “Friends, let us breathe an enormous sigh of relief. We’re going to have a play after all.”
We clapped for one another, and the swings and the understudies clapped with us. The people who’d shaken my hand three hours before came back to shake it again. My mother-in-law, Mrs. Gibbs, who’d been especially good in her part, held onto me a minute more. She told me she’d been Emily once. “Probably before you were born,” she said. “I was nothing like you. You’re one of those Emilys that people will talk about for years. They’ll say, ‘I saw Lara Kenison at Tom Lake when she was a child’ and no one will believe it.”
Maisie’s phone rings. The house rule is no phones at the table but we’ve made an exception for Maisie who keeps getting calls from neighbors asking for help, and we made an exception for Emily so that Benny can text her and tell her what time he’ll be back at the house, and so of course we extended the exception to Nell, because why would we let her sisters answer their phones at the table and make her turn hers off? Joe and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here.
“Sure,” Maisie says, stepping into the kitchen while we listen. “No, no, it’s fine. We’re finished. I’ll come over.” She ends the call and looks at us. “The Lewers have a calf with intractable diarrhea.”
“Does it ever occur to you to try to protect us while we’re eating?” Nell asks.
“Protecting you means putting my clothes in the wash and taking a shower before I come into our room. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to tell you what happened.” She turns to me. “Pause the story, will you? I don’t want to miss the part about Sebastian.”
Emily stands up from the table. “If you’re stopping the story then I’m going home. You just reminded me I haven’t done laundry in two weeks.”
“Then I’m going to go to help Dad.” Nell stands as well.
