“It was never the story!” I say. “It may have been the story you told yourselves but it wasn’t the story we told you.” Over the years I told them I had dated Duke at Tom Lake. Over the years I told them their father and I met at Tom Lake. What I realize in this moment, and Joe realizes it too, is that maybe we’ve never told them more than that. Or maybe they are children looking at their parents and so our lives began when they began and everything else they colored in with fat crayons any way they wanted.
“The four of you can sort this out. I’m going for a swim.” Joe pulls off his boots, his shirt, his jeans. He had gone to the house and put on his swim trunks before coming to the beach, proving once and for all that these girls are his.
13
Duke was somewhere. He was getting his hair pinned, or he had already gone outside to read over his obsessive Editor Webb notebooks and smoke a final cigarette and then stand on his hands. He said it cleared his mind before a performance and I wouldn’t doubt it. All the actors were in costume, swinging their arms around, trilling through scales. Only Uncle Wallace and I were still. If we were not exactly standing together we were very near one another. We were waiting to begin.
“I still get scared,” Uncle Wallace said. He was looking straight ahead and his voice was so quiet I barely heard him. I don’t think he was talking to me anyway. Backstage was dark and the houselights were up. From where we stood we could see the people milling around, looking for their seats. They always made me think of chickens, like a truck had backed up to the theater door and emptied four hundred chickens into the house. They pecked and clucked aimlessly, found one place to roost then changed their minds and went off in search of another.Our Towndoes not have a formal opening; when the audience enters the theater the curtain is up and what little set there is is in place and soon Uncle Wallace would wander out and wait for the chickens to settle, even though the very fact of him standing there, the much beloved television star of another era, impedes the process considerably.
“You’re the Stage Manager,” I whispered to him, “same as I’m Emily.”
He reached down and took my hand in his large, warm hand and we didn’t say anything else. That will always be my memory of Albert Long, the two of us holding hands in the dark until it was time for him to go on.
Nothing about going out onstage as Emily scared me, but playing Mae inFool for Lovemade my feet cold. The expression came from a literal condition: every time I spoke her first line, which was nothing more than the single wordNo!all the blood in my body surged to my heart in an act of self-preservation. My heart needed the blood in order to survive, and so my bloodless extremities were left to freeze. Fear would be another name for it. I was told the last Emily—the one who’d dropped out and made a space for me—had had to audition for both parts. Her Mae, from all accounts, was searing. Pallace had auditioned to understudy both of the parts, and I had no doubt she had been searing as well. But I had never been asked to audition for anything at Tom Lake. I’d been asked to plug two holes in the summer schedule. “Look how good she is!” was what the management said when they came to those first rehearsals ofOur Town, not realizing there was a difference between a first-rate Emily and a first-rate actress.
We had started rehearsals forFool for Lovethe week beforeOur Townopened, and now I had some sense of what Pallace had been talking about. During the day I played a grown woman who was damaged and clear-headed and afraid, then three nights a week I was Emily again. The result was whiplash, and not just because the characters were so wildly different, myabilitywas so wildly different. I’m not sure Duke fully understood how bad I was. He was a full fathom five into his own performance. Duke was Eddie through and through, swinging his lasso, walking like he’d just come off a horse. He radiated his talent and intensity all over me but it did not make me better. The director, a Sam Shepard enthusiast named Cory, saw my failures clearly enough, as did the other two actors in the play, but it was still very early. Everyoneregarded me as talented so maybe it was just taking me a minute to shift gears. But I didn’t have another gear. Ripley had told me not to take acting classes, but he’d also given me a part in a movie in which I was essentially Emily again, and a part in a sitcom in which I was essentially Emily. Even hawking Diet Dr Pepper I was Emily, because she was the only thing I knew how to do. I had the range of a box turtle. I was excellent, as long as no one moved me.
But one of the very best things about playing Emily was that, at least for the duration of the performance and for maybe an hour or two on either side, she was all I thought about. After opening night Joe had gone back to Traverse City for good. Gene the A.D. was in charge of us now but we all knew what we were doing. We were well-trained horses: the starting gate flung open and we ran the race.
More and more I had seen Uncle Wallace struggling, not in any way the audience would have noticed, and truly, the cast might not have seen it either. He never dropped a line but he often missed his marks by a foot or more and the light board op had to scramble to keep the light on him. His voice was good, maybe he lacked his usual boom but we were all wired so it didn’t matter. On the night of his disaster I saw him clenching and unclenching his teeth, like he was taking in an electrical shock. I even looked down to see if he was stepping on something. In the second act, just before Emily marries George, and Duke and I were having our moment—Duke holding me too tightly; Duke’s hand on my ass in a way that was not visible to the public—I really thought Uncle Wallace was going to cry out.
I tried to find him at the second intermission but he was nowhere. He had stepped into the wings and vanished. I couldn’t ask Duke because Duke stayed in character between acts. He would have answered me as Editor Webb and I would have killed him so I just skipped all that. I wished Joe were there.
Somehow I felt that going to Gene would have been ratting Uncle Wallaceout, saying that something was off about the job he was doing when that wasn’t it at all. If Joe had been there I could have told him I was worried, that’s all, just worried, and he would have searched Uncle Wallace out and found some way to gentle him. Joe was no doubt with his aunt and uncle now. I bet they’d already finished dinner and washed the plates and put them away.
When the call came for places, Uncle Wallace reappeared as mysteriously as he had left. He looked better, pinker. I stepped towards him but he held up his hand and looked away.Not herehe was telling me, so he knew I had seen him. I nodded and stepped back. He was holding it together and I needed to let him do that. He was a professional, Uncle Wallace.
The third act ofOur Towntakes place after Emily’s death. She has died giving birth to her second child, though there’s no mention of whether the baby has died, or if her father-in-law, Doc Webb, had been the doctor in attendance. The dead of Grover’s Corners sit in straight rows across the stage, and when Emily joins them I couldn’t help but think about the cemetery at the Nelsons’ farm—the shade and the breeze and the stones that were very nearly rubbed clean of names. Duke had been right, the place had a peace that made a person want to stay. I had never thought about a cemetery that way before, and it helped me. I sat down next to Mother Gibbs and we both stared straight ahead, though in that moment I was remembering her getting out of the lake to put on her underwear.
The nice thing about having an entire script tattooed inside your cell walls is that you can pretty much play your part regardless of circumstances. Uncle Wallace and I went through the third act same as always. But when he brought me back to my mother’s kitchen so that I could see how blindly the living go on, he didn’t step away as he should have. In fact he tucked me into his armpit like a crutch. He was a big man, and I am small,
but I held his weight for him, his cold sweat soaking through the shoulder of my dress. We both said our lines as perfectly as weever had, and maybe we were better, because when we turned to go back to the cemetery on the other side of the stage it was death we were thinking about.
Why did we do this, both of us? Why didn’t we simply pass the row of chairs and keep walking? In a sold-out house of four hundred, some small percentage of the audience were bound to have been doctors. But we soldiered on, stopping in front of my empty chair. I looked at the woman playing Mrs. Soames and mouthed the wordup. She got up and moved to a chair in the back. Whatever was happening, we were all in it now. Not the audience, they were too far away, but all of the actors onstage were with us. I helped Uncle Wallace sit and he kept his arm around me. This was not the way the play was meant to be staged but people told me later it was very affecting, the Stage Manager sitting there among us, saying his final lines. And he did say the lines, every last word of them, even though the electrical current I had seen before had him in its teeth now. I didn’t move, none of us did. We used the full force of our lives to listen to what he was saying, as if the purity of our attention was holding him up. Uncle Wallace talked about the stars and how the earth was straining, straining to make something of itself and how it needed to rest. In all my life I had never heard anything spoken so beautifully, and I felt certain I never would again. No sooner had the curtain come down that he pitched into my lap, bringing up an endless convulsion of blood. Blood poured from his mouth and pooled in the fabric of my white wedding dress, spreading, soaking. I had no idea how a man could lose so much blood and still be alive. I did my best to hold his head up while the rest of them ran to call for a doctor in the house.
An ambulance was called but even if they drove flat out the hospital was still fifteen minutes away. Uncle Wallace and I were sitting in those same two chairs with two doctors in front of us. One took his pulse while the other asked him questions, mostly as a way of making themselves feel useful. Uncle Wallace wasable to remark on his level of pain between retching up another mouthful. He was holding on to me with both his bloodied hands. When the ambulance arrived I said I wanted to go with him. The stage manager—which is to say Pete, the actual stage manager for the show—said no, and the doctors said no, and the paramedics said no, until finally Uncle Wallace let go of me and they took him away. The entire cast was still on the stage, plus the deck crew and runners. Cat, the wardrobe mistress, was shaking when she came back to the dressing room to help me get undressed. She poured hydrogen peroxide on the dress. She had bottles of it, and in the end she got the stain out, even though the stain was more or less the entire dress. I wouldn’t have believed such a thing was even possible.
People told me later how well I had handled the situation but I remembered it with nothing but shame. I could see him sinking and I let him go down. He said his lines, I said my lines. I did nothing to save him.
“How do you think you could have saved him?” Duke asked that night in bed. I had spent twenty minutes in the shower, the water as hot as I could stand it. Even after I took my costume off I had blood all over me. I scrubbed out my bra and underpants with bar soap.
“I could have walked him offstage and driven him to the hospital.”
“Which would have bought him what, twenty minutes?” The lights were off and the moon was reflected in the lake. The moonlight spread across the clean white sheets of our bed. I had finally done the laundry the day before. “He didn’t start vomiting blood because he spent an extra twenty minutes onstage when he didn’t feel well. He started vomiting blood because he’s been an unrepentant drunk for his entire adult life.”
I shook my head, unwilling to relinquish my responsibility. “I should have made him stop. He shouldn’t have kept going.”
“He shouldn’t have kept going, you’re right about that, but it was his decision. You couldn’t have gotten that man off the stage with a crane.”
“Don’t,” I said quietly.
“Nothing against Uncle Wallace,” he said, kissing my forehead. “Nothing at all. But he was teaching you a lesson you’d be wise to learn: you can’t save them that won’t save themselves.”
And the thought of that stark reality, for whatever reason, was the thing that finally got me crying.
No one mentioned my poor performance in rehearsal the next day. They thought I was stiff and halting because Uncle Wallace had vomited blood all over me the night before, not because I’d been stiff and halting all along.Fool for Loveonly has four characters and really, only two, Mae and Eddie. Me and Duke. Pallace was my understudy again, and a guy named Nico was the swing for all three of the male parts. I wanted to go swimming at lunch. I wanted to stay under the water for as long as was possible. Cody, the director, came with us and I wished I’d worn the one-piece. He swam around behind me, telling me about the other Maes he’d seen over the years and how they’d played the part. He recited different lines in their voices so that I would have clear examples of how he wanted me to sound. I wanted to learn, I desperately wanted to be better, but all I could think of was what a good director Joe had been. When we were finished swimming and heading back to the theater, Cody said he was calling off rehearsal for the rest of the day.
“Just go,” he said. “We’re not getting anywhere.”
