9

9

Yes, it was true that Uncle Wallace was a drunk, and his understudy hid in the farthest corner of the theater where not even the light could find him, but plenty of other things were true as well, such as the fact that Albert Long embodied the Stage Manager as completely as he had embodied that long--ago bachelor uncle. Duke might have made fun of him—-dinner theaters, bombastic speeches, lecherous asides—-but when he was onstage there was nothing to complain about. Uncle Wallace never had to reach for a line because the lines were written inside him, just the way Emily’s were written into me, the difference being he’d found a part he wouldn’t age out of. When, in the third act, Uncle Wallace took me back to my mother’s kitchen, he looked at me with so much compassion it stung my eyes. So what if he smelled like gin? So what if he went out for a cigarette and wandered away? The A.D. always managed to find him, guiding him back like an errant lamb. On the stage he was able to bring himself into focus, so that even as the people who knew him said he was different this year, said he was so much worse, we continued to bank on the fact that he had never missed a show. Why wouldn’t the past be the future as well?

After rehearsal, Duke and I stretched out on the grass beside the lake, sharing a cigarette and a beer. “The man takes every bit of joy out of alcohol,” Duke said, tipping the bottle back. “I could hate him for that alone.”

“Somebody told me he plays Lear at another summer stock at the end of the season, that he’s always trying to get them to do a production of it here but he can’t get anybody at Tom Lake interested in Shakespeare.”

Duke lifted an eyebrow. “He’s the one who told you that.”

“Maybe.” I took another drag. One week and my smoking had already vastly improved. “I think he’d make a wild Lear, stomping around screaming. He’d be completely heartbreaking in the end.”

Duke sat up and pulled me into his lap. “And you’d be his little Cordelia, is that what you’re thinking?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“Put down the cigarette.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re dead. You’re Cordelia and you’re dead and I’m going to show you how Uncle Wallace plays Lear.”

I twisted the cigarette into the grass and died right there in his arms. Duke held my lifeless body against his chest, rocking me gently as his hand snaked up under my T--shirt. “Never, never, never, never, never,” he whispered in my hair, squeezing my left breast gently with every declaration. Truly, it was all we could do to make it back to the room.

Our Towncontains a single kiss and it’s not between Emily and George but between Emily and her father, the newspaperman. She pecks his cheek in the first act. There’s also exactly one erotic moment in the play, in the second act, just before George and Emily marry. Emily begs her father to run away with her so that they can build a life together, just the two of them. “Don’t you remember that you used to say—-all the time you used to say—-all the time: that I was your girl! There must be lots of places we can go to.”

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d planted that kiss, said those words, and never given any of it a thought.

Nelson interrupted the scene. Nelson who showed up for work in a collared shirt with the sleeves turned back and nice khaki pants, while the rest of us wandered the stage in cut--offs and Phish T--shirts. “Peter, Lara,” he said calmly. “If you could come up with a slightly more wholesome interpretation, it would be appreciated.”

Everyone laughed. Uncle Wallace, waiting to officiate the union—-by which I mean the union of George and Emily as opposed to the union of the editor and his daughter—-cleared his throat. Nobody was pretending that Duke and I weren’t happening. They were only asking that we tone it down.

Every day at Tom Lake was a week, every week a month. We spent hours in a dark theater, saying the same things to the same people again and again, finding ways to make the world new. In high school and college I’d gone to rehearsals a few times a week, but at Tom Lake rehearsals were our life. Where we stood and how we stood and how we placed our chairs and looked into the lights and spoke to one another and listened, all of it mattered. Uncle Wallace had been right about Nelson. Every day he directed each of us towards a better performance.

Our schedule included precious little free time but we made excellent use of what we had. We wore our swimsuits under our clothes and ran to the lake in lieu of eating lunch. With advanced planning we could get from the stage to being nearly naked and fully submerged in four minutes flat. I owned two suits, the one my grandmother had ordered me from L.L. Bean and the bikini I had not returned to costume the day I was instructed to swim in the backlot pool. I never questioned which one to wear. Pallace came to the lake with her dance partner, Auden, and Auden’s Korean American boyfriend, Charles, who we called W.H. because we never saw one without the other. W.H. was another dancer and also a swing. Mother Gibbs and Mrs. Webb swam in the lake but Mrs. Webb wouldn’t put her head under water and neither would Pallace. They swam like women in classic Holly-wood movies, smiling, with lip gloss. Some days Pallace even wore a hat. The water was cold and none of us cared and all of us screamed. Duke was always the first one in. Maybe that’s all that needs to be said about Duke: he was forever the first one in, cutting long strokes out to the swim platform while the rest of us waded in up to our knees then stopped to watch the little fish trying to make sense of our enormous feet. He would disappear and then pop up again someplace far away, pushing his wet black hair out of his face. “Where’s my girl?” he bellowed. “Where’s my birthday girl?” It was his favorite line in the play and he got to say it twice in the third act. He said it at night when he folded back the sheet and slipped into my bed.

I swam out to Duke, looped my arms around his neck, looped my legs around his waist in the deep water. He held me up.

“You two are going to break something,” Pallace said, swimming past us. “The people in the first ten rows are going to have to wipe their glasses off.”

“Jealous girl,” Duke said.

She laughed, then glided away. When Duke started acting like he was being eaten by a shark, I untangled myself and swam after Pallace. I was in love with the play and in love with Tom Lake, and maybe I was in love with Duke, and certainly I was in love with Pallace, her red bikini every bit as insubstantial as my own.

“You must be bored to tears having to sit there all morning,” I said when I caught up to her. Just our heads were sticking up above the water. The blue sky was her backdrop and the sunlight was her lighting; it caught the gold hoops in her ears.

“Nothing boring about it,” she said. “I’m watching you.”

I thought about those auditions in high school, and how I put together my idea of Emily by watching people play her wrong. Wouldn’t it be a different thing entirely to watch someone doing her right? If, in fact, Pallace thought I was doing her right. “Now I’m going to be nervous.”

“You are many things, Emily Webb, but nervous isn’t one of them.”

“You seem pretty relaxed yourself.” My arms worked back and forth across the surface of the lake.

She shook her head. “Dancing and singing is all about working your ass off so that people think you just roll out of bed dancing and singing. I mean, acting is like that too, but it’s less physical for the most part.”

Duke and I had missed breakfast again. We were perfecting the craft.

“Anyway, being your understudy is teaching me things,” she said. “Half the day I’m playing a little country girl in a town full of white people, doing the whole thing in my head, then the other half of the day I’m playing a hooker in a German night club and I’m doing the whole thing in my body. That’s why I like to swim in the middle. It helps the transition.” The water was so clear I could watch the graceful mechanics of her legs as she treaded.

“Fool for Love is going to be a lot more work,” I said, though she was the understudy for that as well so she already knew.

“Or a lot more fun. You and Duke in Fool for Love.” She laughed, swimming a gentle lap around me. “That’s a lucky piece of casting if I’ve ever heard one. They’ll have to hose out the theater. Good thing you’re not going up against that dopey George again. Not the guy you’d want slinging you into bed every night.” She shaded her eyes with her hand and watched Mother Gibbs as she walked out of the lake. “Is it time?” Pallace called.

Mother Gibbs shook her head. “Fifteen minutes,” she shouted back. “I want to dry off and put my underwear on.”

Lee was sitting there on a beach towel the size of a picnic blanket, watching us swim.

“So what happens if you end up having to play Emily?” I asked her.

Pallace gave me a squint. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

“No, no, nothing like that. I just wonder how it would work.”

“Tuesday night Our Town, Wednesday night, Cabaret, Thursday night, Our Town, Friday night, Cabaret, Saturday, Our Town matinee with Cabaret at night, Sunday is Cabaret at night but no Our Town matinee, so there’s a break. Monday I sleep.”

“That’s not possible.”

Pallace disagreed. “It’s possible, not optimal. I’d like to play Emily once or twice, only if you had a UTI or something, but other than that I pray for your health.” She was looking back at the shore. “Do you know who that is?”

Mother Gibbs was gone and in her place a man now stood at the edge of the water, waving his arms over his head. “Peedee,” he called. “Peedee!”

I looked over my shoulder to see who he was looking at—-Duke on the swim platform was wet and shining like a god. There should have been a golden trident in his hand, a crown of seaweed and starfish in his hair. He waved his arms wildly in return then dove into the lake. It was straight out of a movie, the elegance of his dive and then his swimming, clean and fast, none of the splashing around he’d been doing before.

“Must be his dealer,” Pallace said. “We should go in anyway.”

Off she went, but for a moment I stayed behind treading water, watching all the actors and dancers as they swam to shore. Lee folded up his towel and walked away. I wondered if anyone had ever prayed for my health before. My grandmother, probably. She would have done that for me.

“It’s Saint Sebastian, isn’t it?” Emily says. She is Emily again, fully restored, taking cherries down at twice the clip of the rest of us.

I nod. “He used to drive up when he had days off.”

Maisie looks at Emily. “How could you possibly know who it was?”

“I like reading interviews, that’s all. Sebastian was always there. Don’t you remember when Duke won his Oscar? The first word out of his mouth was Sebastian.”

None of us remember that, but I’m more than a decade into convincing myself that Emily’s attention to the details of Duke’s life isn’t something to be alarmed about.

“So even if you know he was close to his brother, how do you know that his brother’s come to Tom Lake?” Maisie asks, pushing. “Break’s over, time to get back to work. Why don’t you just think it’s Gene the A.D. calling him in?”

Emily sighs and I worry that Maisie’s going to set her off. “Sebastian was the only one who called him Peedee. Peter Duke. And Duke was the only one who called him Saint Sebastian.”

“The first part is right,” I say. “But pretty much everyone who knew Sebastian called him Saint Sebastian.”

“To his face?” Emily asks.

I nod, picturing Sebastian’s face in my mind, as restful as Duke’s was restive.

“I’ve been looking forward to Saint Sebastian ever since Dad told us about him playing tennis,” Nell says, as if Sebastian were a character who had just made his entrance in the play. “Where did he live?” It’s Emily she’s asking, not me.

“In 1988 he would still have been in East Detroit.”

“Wait,” Maisie says. Maisie could not care less about her sister’s mood. “First off, what the hell is East Detroit? And secondly, is there a biography of Sebastian Duke that I failed to get my copy of?”

Maisie wouldn’t have known the details of Sebastian’s life, and she surely wouldn’t have heard of East Detroit, seeing as how it was renamed in 1992, but Emily knows everything, and she lays out the facts like a state historian: East Detroit renamed itself when Detroit proper was circling the drain; the city council of East Detroit tried to bolster eroding property values by changing its name to Eastpointe, that fancy silent “e” at the end an indicator that the white people lived over here and the Black people lived over there, on the other side of Eight Mile. Emily’s obsession with a movie star had given her this particular knowledge. In her role as the living archivist of Duke, she is also the archivist of the vanished East Detroit.

“You’ve just been walking around with this in your head all these years and you never told anybody?” Maisie asks.

“You’ll be surprised to know that this is the first time it’s come up.” Even though Emily’s face is impassive, I think she’s pleased we’ve finally knocked on the door of her vast storehouse of data.

“Was Saint Sebastian still a tennis player then?”

Emily looks at me.

“Go ahead,” I say.

“He was done,” Emily tells her sisters. She never stops picking cherries, her hands on autopilot. “He’d made the National Sixteen and Under in Kalamazoo. He played the Future Challenger circuit, but he didn’t make the pros. Tennis costs a lot of money and their family didn’t have it. But he was still coaching then. Duke used to say Sebastian couldn’t have been much of a coach if he couldn’t even make a decent tennis player out of his own brother, but Duke was pretty good, wasn’t he?”

“Duke was a great tennis player,” I say. “He just wasn’t as great as his brother. And Sebastian was a very good coach. He taught me how to play.”

“You can play tennis?” Emily looks at me, surprised. They’re all surprised.

“I played that summer. Pallace and I both played. Sometimes we played doubles with the boys but that was a joke.” What Pallace and I never did was play each other because what would have been the point in that?

“It was just the two of them, right?” Nell asks. “Just the two boys?”

Emily shakes her head. “They had a younger sister.”

“There wasn’t a sister.” Only Duke and Sebastian, raised by wolves, but even as I’m saying it, my mind is scrolling backwards: late nights, rehearsal breaks, floating in the water holding hands. What did Duke ever tell me? That he was hungry, that he wanted me to take my swimsuit off in the lake, that he needed a drink? For as much as the feel of Peter Duke’s hair slipping between my fingers is mine, the facts of his life more accurately belong to my daughter.

“Sarah was the youngest,” Emily says. “She died of Ewing’s sarcoma when she was four.”

Was it possible? Duke was always saying he’d take me home with him, back to East Detroit, so he could show me where he came from. Surely the little girl’s photograph would have been on the mantel in their parents’ house. I would have asked who she was.

“Sarah Duke,” Emily says.

“I didn’t know.”

“He never talked about her.”

“But you knew,” Maisie says, because it was starting to feel like Emily had gotten Duke’s number after all, that she had somehow called him from her bedroom when she was fourteen.

“Some journalist went through every piece of information in the public record about his family. I think it was for Vanity Fair. Anyway, he found the death certificate and then he sprung it on him in the interview, just to see how he’d react. Apparently Duke walked out. He wouldn’t finish the interview, wouldn’t sit for photos.”

Good for you, I want to say to him. I who knew nothing and have nothing to say. I can remember very clearly when Emily was eight and Maisie was six and Nell was four, the big girls were in school all day and Nell came home from preschool after lunch. The sweetness of those hours when it was just the two of us never left. What would life have been without Nell? Who would Emily and Maisie have confided in once they were grown? We had a younger sister.

Nell puts her hand on my shoulder, Nell who reads my mind. “Go back to the lake,” she says to me. “Tell us about Sebastian.”

I didn’t know Duke had a brother, and while later I could see some resemblance, it wasn’t immediately evident. When I was close enough to really see him I didn’t think, he must be my boyfriend’s brother; I thought, this guy’s not a drug dealer. He was talking to Pallace, making her laugh, and Duke had on his biggest possible Duke smile. My swimsuit was seersucker, blue and white, with a tiny, heart--shaped button sewn between the cups with red thread, a lovely, unnecessary detail that spoke to how much the stupid thing must have cost. I shivered slightly when I walked out of the water even though the day was so hot. Pallace had to get to her Cabaret rehearsal and it was late but she waited for me. She took the towel from around her waist and draped it over my shoulders, like she knew I’d forgotten my towel. Maybe she did know. We were so naked, the two of us.

Duke put his arm around me. “This is the one!” he said. “This is Emily. Emily, this is my brother, Sebastian.”

“Lara.” I shook his hand.

Sebastian smiled. “He forgets.”

Sebastian was a man, that was the thing. Sebastian, scarcely a year his senior, was a man and Duke was a boy and Pallace and I were girls.

Everyone else had already left. Pallace tugged her sundress over her head and I was trying to pull up my shorts, suddenly envying Mother Gibbs her dry underwear. I rubbed quickly at my torso, my hair, so I could give Pallace her towel back.

“Maybe I could have come at a worse time?” Sebastian asked.

“Are you kidding me? It’s the perfect time!” Duke said, his voice exalted. “We’re working on the third act after lunch. It’s all Emily. You won’t believe how great she is.”

“Are you in the third act?” Sebastian asked Pallace.

“Not the third act you’re talking about. I’m in a different third act and I’m going to be obscenely late if I don’t leave right this second.”

I gave back the stripey beach towel. “Go.”

She looked at all of us, making it clear she wanted to stay. She smiled at Sebastian. “I’m so late,” she said, and then she turned around and ran. She was wearing flip--flops, a bag over her shoulder. She bounded off to the rehearsal studio while the three of us stood there, watching her go.

“My god,” Sebastian said. “Is she a runner?”

Duke gave the question serious consideration. Was Pallace a runner? “I would say she is everything.”

We headed back up the hill to the theater, Duke lit up in his happiness. He carried his shirt and espadrilles in one hand, and kept his other hand on his brother’s back. How was the drive and had he had lunch? Sebastian could sleep in his room in the dorm because he was bunking with me. Duke hadn’t dried his feet and now they were coated in dust. He never brought a towel to the lake because he always just used my towel, but today, for whatever reason, I’d forgotten.

“Are you in the third act?” Sebastian asked Duke as he held open the door to the theater.

“Where’s my girl?” Duke called out as we walked into the darkness. “Where’s my birthday girl?”

None of us knew we were at the beginning of anything but this was where the four of us started. After rehearsal, Duke took his brother back to his room to get him settled, and for the first time it struck me that I had no idea where Duke’s room was. My room—-he was always telling me this—-was so much better. I walked out of the theater alone and thought about what I should do with my time. I never had time. I should write letters, or at the very least postcards, and let everyone know how well things were going. My intention was to go straight to my room but I heard music through an open window. “What good. Is sit--ting. Alone in your room?” the singer asked. The accompanying piano felt tinny and stale, exactly right. The words were less a question than a directive. “Come to the Ca--ba--ret, old chum?.?.?.” I went inside and stood against the back wall of the rehearsal room.

I’d left Grover’s Corners, where we sat in a row of chairs in the cemetery, staring ahead, and arrived at the Kit Kat Klub, where the dancers straddled their chairs with intention, stood on chairs bending forward, asses offered to the light. Pallace draped backwards across the seat of one, the top of her head touching the floor, her legs scissoring up in time with the music. She was still wearing her red swimsuit, all the dancers were wearing some variation of swim wear, and it all looked vaguely obscene so far away from the lake. Upside down and sideways they were singing, dancing, grinding away while a man at an upright piano played along, darting up a hand to turn the sheet of music then coming right back to playing again.

It would be easy to describe Pallace as the most beautiful, most talented person I had ever seen, but Tom Lake was bristling with her equals. I suppose a few attractive duds had snuck in here and there, the kid playing George being one, but for the most part the performers had a magnetism that required no practice whatsoever—-either you’ve got it or you don’t. Duke had a truckload of it. He had it when he spoke the dullest lines of Editor Webb, or ordered coffee, or took me to bed. If Jimmy--George from high school knew how to look at a person, Duke knew how to make a person look at him. The Kit Kat girls were no slouches in that department either. I had come in to watch my friend, but confronted with the whole lot of them I hardly knew where to rest my eyes. They all looked hungry. I went from Pallace to some others I’d met at dinner or in the lake, a few I didn’t know, and finally came to rest on Sally Bowles, who stood in the middle of the stage like a diamond set in a ring. Sally Bowles, her leg slung shamelessly over the back of a chair, extended an invitation to the cabaret that no one could refuse.

Just as I’d started to think I could act, I found myself wishing I could sing and dance. I wanted to climb up on one of the Kit Kat chairs, to be a woman rather than a girl.

When they were finished, Pallace used that same striped towel to dry herself again, laughing with the other dancers as she pulled on her dress. I waved to her, and when she saw me, she smiled like I was the person she was most hoping to see. “You’re here!” she said.

“I want to be your understudy,” I said.

She fell breathless into the folding chair beside me, bending over to unbuckle her high--heeled shoes. “How much do you know about the brother?”

“Until a few hours ago I didn’t know he had a brother. That’s how much I know about the brother.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He’s staying for a couple of days.”

“Did he say anything about me,” she said, the perspiration shining at her hairline.

I thought for a minute. What had Sebastian said? “He was impressed with your running.”

She smiled. “I’ll take that.”

“You want Duke’s brother?”

“He’s not a dancer and he’s not an actor and he doesn’t work in a theater and he has very nice shoulders.”

It turned out that was what she was looking for.

“I understand what Pallace’s talking about,” Nell says, speaking from unreferenced experience. “Nobody should date actors.”

“Except for Mom,” Maisie says. She and I pick up the ladder together and carry it down the row to the next tree so one of us can climb up and clean the top, and by one of us I mean Maisie. Maisie loves to climb. We were always pulling her off the curtains when she was little.

“Why should Mom have to date an actor?” Nell says. “It’s not like it turned out so well for her.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” I say. Was it that bad? Yes and no.

Emily ignores this. “If Mom hadn’t dated Duke then what would we be talking about now? Fungicides?”

“We’d go back to listening to the news all day,” I say.

Maisie shakes her head. “No more news.”

Nell agrees. “We’d rather talk about your wedding than a global pandemic,” she says to Emily.

Emily’s wedding. I have not said a word about it to Joe.

“Well, that’s reason enough to date an actor right there,” Emily says, “because we sure as hell aren’t talking about my wedding.”

It is as if every action in my life has been planned for the pleasures of this very afternoon.

Nell takes the bucket from around her neck and dumps her cherries in the lug. She gives herself a minute to roll her shoulders before putting it on again, then turns her face towards the sun, closing her eyes. Sometimes I wonder if the work isn’t too much for her, though she’d sooner die picking cherries than be the weak sister. “I would have dated Saint Sebastian,” she says.

“You’re telling me that you would have turned down Duke, arguably the greatest actor of his generation and certainly the most famous, so that you could date his brother who didn’t make it as a tennis player?” Emily says.

Maisie disagrees. “Oh, come on, that’s not fair. It’s impossible to make it as a tennis player, not to mention the fact that Saint Sebastian was, you know, a saint. That’s a very attractive quality in a man. And even if Duke was famous he didn’t have a happy life.”

“You don’t know that,” Emily says, picking, picking.

I might not have known much about Duke but I knew his life wasn’t happy. I put my arm around Nell’s shoulder. “As insane as this conversation is, I think you’re making the right choice. And anyway, even if Sebastian didn’t make the pros he was still an excellent tennis player. He played McEnroe.”

The three of them drop their hands and I know I’ve finally said something of real interest. I can hear Joe telling me not to get them overexcited. They have to keep working.

“Did he win?” Maisie’s voice is hushed, and Maisie’s voice is never hushed.

“No,” I say. “But it was something he was proud of, just that he got so far as to even be on the same court with him. They were both seventeen. McEnroe was a big deal at seventeen.”

“What was the score?” It was a scrap of information for Emily to add to her collection.

“Six--two, six--o.”

Nell covers her face with her hands and moans. “Oh, Saint Sebastian! I can’t bear it.”

“What are you talking about? He was happy!” I say. “Sebastian never expected to win.”

“He did,” Nell says. “Even if he never admitted it, he thought he might. He wanted to.”

Maybe she’s right. Saint Sebastian was twenty--nine when we met, and it was Duke who told me the story about McEnroe. At seventeen, Sebastian must have thought of himself as someone who would make it. The number of things I’d failed to grasp back then was as limitless as the stars in the night sky.