13

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 Town does 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 in Fool for Love made my feet cold. The expression came from a literal condition: every time I spoke her first line, which was nothing more than the single word No! 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 of Our Town, not realizing there was a difference between a first--rate Emily and a first--rate actress.

We had started rehearsals for Fool for Love the week before Our Town opened, 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, my ability was 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. Everyone regarded 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 Wallace out, 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 here he 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 of Our Town takes 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 we ever 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 word up. 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 was able 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 Love only 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.”

It was so shocking to me, so shaming, and still I was grateful.

Pallace gave me the keys to her Honda and I went back to my room to change. She couldn’t come with me because it was Cabaret night, and while it might have been nice if Duke had offered to ride along, we both knew Uncle Wallace wouldn’t care about seeing him.

“Which brings us to the subject of Lee,” Nell says over dinner.

“Wait, who’s Lee again?” Maisie asks.

Joe nods solemnly. “Who is Lee, indeed.”

“The understudy?” Emily scoops green beans onto her plate. “The rich guy?”

“The talentless, unprepared understudy,” Nell clarifies. “He’s like one of those crazed axe murderers who’s hiding in the basement. I’ve been waiting for him to reemerge this entire time.”

“Are you serious?” Maisie says. “Poor Uncle Wallace is in the hospital having practically bled to death on our mother and you’re thinking about the understudy?”

“He was something to think about,” Joe says.

“Stop it!” Emily says. “For all we know, Uncle Wallace is dead.”

Joe and I shake our heads in unison.

“What happened to him?” Maisie asks.

“Esophageal varices,” I say. “It’s a rupture in the vein that runs along the bottom of the esophagus. Truly, something you do not want to happen.”

“How do they fix it?” Maisie asks, and I know that before she goes to sleep tonight she will be looking up esophageal varices to see if it can happen to dogs, to pigs, to rabbits.

“They put something called a Blakemore tube down the throat. There’s a balloon on the end.” I stop myself. “Forget it. You don’t want to know.”

Emily puts down her fork.

“I don’t mean to be insensitive,” Nell says. “You know how glad I am that Uncle Wallace pulled through.”

“He only pulled through until the fall.” Just saying it makes me catch my breath. So many years ago! Dear, stupid, intractable Uncle Wallace.

“He had cirrhosis as well,” Joe says. “He didn’t stop drinking.”

“They put a balloon in his esophagus and he kept drinking?” Emily asks.

Joe and I nod as the girls sadly shake their heads.

“Was that his last performance?” Nell asks. “That night with you?”

Funny how we never know. Uncle Wallace didn’t go onstage thinking it would be his last night. When my last night came I didn’t know it either, my last time to play Emily, my last swim in the lake. “I guess it was, the shape he was in. He went home after he got out of the hospital, back to Chicago.”

“Nell’s right,” Emily says. “Tell us about Lee. You can finish up with Uncle Wallace later but I need a break if I’m going to eat dinner.”

Joe sighs, tents his fingers. “Talking about Uncle Wallace bleeding out onstage will ruin your dinner but talking about Lee will ruin mine.” He looks at me but I shrug. I’ve done most of the telling around here. If Joe is forced to reminisce about Lee, so be it.

“Okay,” he says. “First off, this wasn’t my problem. I had gotten the play to opening night. That was my contractual obligation. Lee was Gene’s problem now.”

“Whatever happened to Gene?” I ask.

“Children’s television,” Joe says. “Last I heard he’d made it to Sesame Street. Gene was a talented guy, but that didn’t mean he was up for Lee. He went to find Lee as soon as the ambulance pulled away. They were still mopping up the stage when Lee had gone back to his house. It must have been eleven o’clock at night by the time Gene got to Lee’s and started knocking on the door.”

“The only person in the company who left the theater was the understudy,” Nell says.

“That’s a bad sign,” Maisie says.

Their father nods. “Gene doesn’t stop knocking. That’s what I liked about Gene. He came across as very mild but he was tenacious. 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’t in the 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, “a dynamic at 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 long time. 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.

“For about ten minutes,” he says.

“So wait.” Nell looks at me. “You dated George, and then you dated Editor Webb, and then you married the Stage Manager.”

“I never thought about that.” I look over at my husband and smile. “I married the Stage Manager.”

The hospital was small and cheerful in the way hospitals never are anymore: red brick, red geraniums. I asked for Albert Long’s room number and the woman at the information desk could not have been happier to give it to me. I found Uncle Wallace lying flat on his back and sound asleep, wearing a blue and yellow University of Michigan football helmet. Not a jersey, a helmet. A fat red tube was coming out of his mouth and the tube was tied to the face guard. Had it been a brain tumor that had caused him to bleed? Had they scooped the contents of his skull into a football helmet for safekeeping? I tiptoed to the edge of the bed to see if it was really him.

“It’s disturbing,” the woman in the next bed said, “but you’d be surprised how fast you get used to it.”

In fact, it was so disturbing that I’d failed to register the room’s second occupant, a smartly dressed blonde holding an open copy of Architectural Digest. Her bed was cranked to the angle of a chaise longue, poolside.

“Hello!” she said in a stage whisper, then smiled. She was wearing lipstick. She looked so familiar I wondered if she was an actress. We have an ability to spot one another.

“How is he?” I whispered back, not entirely sure I wanted to know. Uncle Wallace was a smaller man in a hospital bed, in a Wolverines helmet. He looked old.

“I don’t know,” she said. “No one around here can tell me much more than he isn’t dead.” The steady beeping of the heart monitor confirmed this.

“Why the helmet?”

She nodded as if to say, Oh, that. “As best as I can understand it, the tube coming out of his mouth is connected to a balloon inside him that’s keeping his esophagus from bleeding. They have to tie the red tube to the face mask of the helmet to keep everything in place.”

I nodded, putting my hand on his wrist. I didn’t like to think about tubes and where they went. No one does.

“Were you at the play last night?” she asked.

I nodded again.

“Turns out one of the doctors from this hospital was in the audience. He said it was a mess. Poor Albert. I’m Elyse, by the way.” She gave a little wave. “Second wife.”

Uncle Wallace had a wife, two wives? “I didn’t know he was married,” I said.

She reviewed me then with an entirely new level of seriousness. “The two of you? What are you, fourteen?”

I held up my hands. “No, no! I’m Emily in the play. We work together, that’s all.”

She closed her magazine and then, for a moment, closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. He doesn’t always make the best choices.” She looked at me again. “Which isn’t to say you wouldn’t have been a delightful choice. It’s just—-”

“I understand,” I said. I didn’t understand, but I was tired.

“He’s got a young wife now, or she’s younger than me but she’s nowhere near as young as you.”

“Is she coming?” The second and third wives in one hospital room, that would be something. For all I knew the first one would be showing up as well.

“They’re in the process of disentangling, Albert and his third wife, which, I’m guessing, is why he put me down as his personal contact. Or maybe Tom Lake just never updates their intake forms. Anyway, I got the call and so here I am.”

“Do you think the other wife knows what happened?”

She shrugged as if to say that wasn’t her problem, which I suppose it wasn’t. “My plan is to get him out of here as soon as I can, take him back to Chicago and get him into a grown--up hospital. No disrespect to Tiny Town here but I think he may need something more advanced than a football helmet.”

“That’s so nice of you.” All I knew about divorce was what I’d seen in movies or read in novels. I couldn’t remember any cases where the second ex--wife steps in to take her former husband home from the hospital.

Elyse turned on her side to watch his labored respiration. “We’ve got kids,” she said. “They’re in their twenties now but they’re still kids, you know? They love him. They grew up watching Uncle Wallace. They think he’s a fantastic father because he played one on TV.” Why should I know this? Why should I know anything? Because we’d spent six weeks standing so close together, saying the exact same words day after day? I knew how naive it made me look to be shocked by everything. Uncle Wallace didn’t have kids. He had his sister’s orphans, and the Stage Manager, well, the Stage Manager didn’t have anyone because he was essentially God. I asked her if I could do anything to help.

“Maybe you could pack up his room for him. That would be helpful.”

“Sure, I can do that.”

She stretched out her legs and yawned. She must have driven through the night. “I’ll tell him you came when he wakes up. I’ll tell him the sweet girl from the play came to see him. What did you say your name was?”

I told her it was Emily.

“When did he die?” Emily asks me. There is so much tenderness in her voice. Had we told this story earlier in life, Emily might have grown up convinced that Uncle Wallace was her father, though really, that might have been worse.

I look at Joe. “Fall? Winter maybe? I can’t remember.”

Maisie takes out her phone and taps in his name. “July twenty--eighth, 1988.” She reads the names of his three wives, his two children, his major roles. “The actor will be remembered as the beloved Uncle Wallace. The second wife was Elyse Adler. She played his girlfriend on the show for two seasons.”

I looked at her tiny picture on the phone. “Oh my god.”

Nell and Emily lean in to see her pretty face.

“So he died just a couple of weeks after I saw him.” So much had happened that summer, and in the confusion, I had forgotten him. “How old was he?”

Maisie takes a moment to scroll, stopping to admire the other two wives. “Born January twentieth, 1931, died July twenty--eighth, 1988. Fifty--six.”

“What?”

She holds up the screen to show me. There he is. No picture of his own children, just those little orphan actors in his arms.

“He was my age,” I say.

Emily shakes her head. “You’re fifty--seven.”