Their father nods. “Gene doesn’t stop knocking. That’s what I liked about Gene. He came across as very mild but he wastenacious. He’d been there maybe fifteen minutes when finally a light goes on upstairs.”
“Tell me he didn’t send his wife down.” I’ve never heard this part of the story.
“He sends his wife down.”
The girls do their unison groan.
“She opens the door six inches, tells Gene it’s late and Lee has gone to bed. He’s very tired after the performance.”
“He wasn’tinthe performance!” Nell cries. I can see now that her dinner will be ruined as well.
“Gene tells her to please wake him up, tells her it’s important, a man is very sick. She wants to know if he’s dead, and when Gene says ‘No, Missus’—” He looks at me again. “What was his last name?”
I can’t remember. I’ve blocked it. Joe nods. “Missus says if Uncle Wallace isn’t dead then Gene should call in the morning after ten. Gene tells her that Lee can just open the door at ten because he isn’t leaving.”
“I’m assuming there was a...” Emily pauses, searching for the correct word, “adynamicat work here.”
“Black man, white woman, huge house, middle of the night,” Joe says. “Yes, there was a dynamic. In fact I would hazard to say it was the dynamic that sent Gene into a career of directing puppets. But into that dynamic walks Lee himself, glasses on, fully dressed, asking his wife who had come to see them so late.Oh, Gene, goodness, I didn’t know it was you, so then they have to go through all of that.”
Maisie pushes away her plate.
“Lee sends his wife back to bed and steps out on the front porch, closing the door behind him. Gene tells him he’ll have to go on as the Stage Manager, day after tomorrow. Then Lee asks if Uncle Wallace is dead. When Gene says no, Lee completely relaxes. He claps Gene on the shoulder. ‘He’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘It might not seem like it but trust me, I’ve known this guy a longtime. He always goes on. If he has to walk here from the hospital, he’ll do it. He won’t miss a show.’?”
I pound my hand on the table. “He’s missing the show!” I say this as the person he bled on, the person who went to see him in the hospital.
Joe nods again, a marvel of restraint. “They go in circles for a while, Gene explaining and Lee demurring until finally Gene, who doesn’t feel like he’s been hinting at anything, becomes explicit: The company will not allow Albert Long to return, and as his understudy, Lee will perform the role on Thursday night.”
Then suddenly I do remember. Joe told me this story eons ago. I remember all of it. “This is the best part!”
“Lee just stares at him and finally he says, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Then he goes inside and closes the door.”
“Bartleby!” Nell shouts. “He Bartlebied him.”
Her sisters, smart women both, stare blankly.
“?‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’?” Nell says. “Herman Melville. Look it up.”
“How do you remember these things?” Emily asks her sister.
“Trust me,” Joe says. “It was unintentional on his part.”
“So what happened?” Nell can scarcely stay in her chair. “Who played the part?”
“Your father,” I say, beaming.
“You were the Stage Manager?” Emily is incredulous. They all are. I think Joe is the obvious choice but if we’d made them guess all night they wouldn’t have come up with the answer.
“Gene drove up here the next morning. He said I had to do it, which meant driving down to Tom Lake and back three times a week for the rest of the run. Poor Gene, I wanted to punch him but it wasn’t his fault.”
“Why you?” Maisie asks.
“I knew the part.”
“You knew the whole part?” Nell is in love with her father, her actual father who has saved the play.
Joe gives the back of his head a ferocious scratch, the way Hazel would have scratched her own head with her paw. “I played it in college and then with a summer rep outside Chicago.”
“You wanted to be an actor?” Emily asks.
