Playhouse, p.7
Playhouse, page 7
Malcolm
Arthur Grausbeck convened the Summer Acting Camp for children on Monday at noon. The board had decided that even with the renovation, the classes could take place in the black box (which would be substantially unchanged—one wall would be moved back four feet toward the end of the process, to make room for more seats). Malcolm, stopping by to see more auditions, decided to look in on the first meeting. Thaddeus was there, conducting it, and Malcolm found that he liked the younger man’s way with children, though the theater manager seemed vaguely distracted, as well. The sound of saws and hammering coming through the walls was a problem. There were nine children from local schools. Thaddeus had divided them up into three groups of three. Intermittently having to raise his voice over all the noise, he explained how they would be doing improvisations. He would give them the situation, and they would take it from there. It was quite clear as the exercise went on that each of them had talent. “They’re stunning,” Malcolm said, meaning it. “Do they go through an application process?”
“Teachers at the schools pick them.”
“I should’ve covered this when I was with WMC.”
“Maybe you can get somebody—” the theater manager began, then halted. “Sorry.”
Malcolm smiled. “I’m not on speaking terms with those folks, Thaddeus. Um, their choice.”
In the wake of the accident, the three days of house arrest, and the month of rehab, his firing had been sprung upon him, this after several “strong” statements by the program director and the station owner that WMC was standing by its most prominent newscaster in his illness. They used the word. Illness. And within ten minutes on the morning of his return to the studio, he was told bluntly that his tenure was over; two uniformed security guards escorted him out as if he were a threat to safety.
Now, he said to Thaddeus, “You understand.”
“I do,” said the latter. “Forgive me, really.”
Before them, three at a time by turns, the children performed, using different accents for an improvised scene he’d given them, of people from different cultures on a bus.
“Would you like to conduct the camp?” the theater manager asked.
“Oh, yes,” Malcolm told him. “Thanks, actually, I would.”
The acting camp provided an agreeable surprise: he liked being around the children, who knew nothing at all about him.
* * *
—
During his search for part-time work that week, he received the notion that some people talked to him only because they were curious about the fallen local celebrity. Now and then he experienced a disagreeable sense of being gaped at, like a freak. No one had work for him. But there was the acting camp with the talented children, and he considered that he was at least doing something, which was a change from spending days reading Churchill’s measured summaries of the movements of great masses of soldiers and matériel in all the theaters of war, or wandering through Chekhov’s beautifully exact portrayals of life in late-nineteenth-century Russia.
One morning, toward the end of the acting camp, he saw a listing for a butler, and on an impulse he drove to the address, which turned out to be an enormous cathedral of a house—the very picture of antebellum splendor—on the edge of the Old Forest, down a long, tree-lined driveway. He saw the big wraparound porch and columns through the trees. He hadn’t thought he would actually go through with it—indeed he suspected that the whole thing must be a joke. But seeing the house, he grew curious enough to take the driveway in.
Forsythia and crepe myrtle bordered the structure, and the air was thick with floral aromas. A massive magnolia tree stood to the left of the porch, studded with yawning white blossoms—each looking like some capacious creature with a gaping mouth—and the tree itself put him in mind of a stout personage holding an armful of packages and just managing not to drop one.
The listing, it turned out, was serious.
The person who had placed the ad was a tall, pale-eyed woman with a narrow column of a face topped by wispy white hair. She had a long neck, stretched seeming, as though her height were attributable to some invisible force pulling her skyward. Her stunned expression at the sight of him standing there on her big porch made him want to laugh. After a long silence, she spoke: “What on earth do you want?”
So, she had recognized him.
He decided to play it. He stood straight, hands clasped at his waist, and with exaggerated dignity said, “I am here regarding your classified ad, madam. Seeking a butler.”
She stared. “You?”
In his most sonorous newscaster’s voice, he said, “It would seem that your need of a butler can be quite adequately met by myself, madam. Would you not agree?” And when she didn’t answer, he bowed, just slightly. She closed the door, and stared at him through its small oval window. He stared back. They remained that way for a time on either side of the door. Finally he bowed again, and walked off.
She opened the door and called to him. “Come here, please.”
He attempted to remain in character, as it were, ambling back to the base of the porch steps.
“I don’t need your service,” she said. “But I have a small vacant cottage behind the house that I’ve put up for rent.”
“Wouldn’t that be where you keep your butler?”
She folded her arms. “If that was meant to offend, it was woefully short of the mark. I have a cottage to rent. The butler would have his own room to stay in, on the premises.”
“I didn’t mean to offend. May I take down the information and let you know?”
“I was not averse to your work as a television journalist.” Her tone was matter-of-fact.
He bowed again, marveling at his own sense of the gesture as being required. “I thank you, kindly.”
She reached into her long skirt and brought out a small red change purse, from which she removed a card. She glanced at it before offering it to him with a subtle yet noticeable touch of wariness, like someone offering a morsel to a bear.
“I thank you,” he said again, and, once more, he bowed.
A little later, driving down Union Avenue toward the river, he began laughing. It seemed to him that he hadn’t laughed like that in months.
And he found that thinking about the tall woman with the television newsman at her door helped his mood. Her card read Eleanor Cruikshank, Author, with her email address, and book titles: White Hawthorne, Little Acts of Retribution, and Mrs. Dowling. They were literary romances, labeled as such, and when he looked them up on the internet, they showed many reactions and apparently healthy sales. White Hawthorne interested him most because it was about the last days of Keats, a favorite poet of his since reading Fitzgerald and Tender Is the Night in college. The Fitzgerald had led him to Keats. He ordered all three books for next-day delivery, and sent her an email saying that if by chance someone hadn’t already snapped it up, he was indeed interested in the cottage. She replied promptly that she had supposed he was, and would not rent it until she heard from him one way or another, or until the end of the month, whichever came first. This pass helped relieve the ache of his notoriety in the circumstances, and at the end of that week, at last, he found a part-time position at Gateway Travel Agency—three mornings a week, booking cruises and flights elsewhere. That was how he thought of it. People seeking to go elsewhere. The pay, along with his salary at the theater, was just enough to get by from day to day.
II
Ghost Light
Tuesday, June 9–Wednesday, June 17
Thaddeus
He was sitting alone in the living room. An old Humphrey Bogart movie he didn’t recognize was on TCM. He had made himself a snifter of cognac, and he was holding the drink with its lovely stinging aroma to his nose. He thought of Bogart’s death. And the deaths of all the others in the film. Ridiculous. When the film ended, he put the snifter on the side table, walked slowly around to the stairs and up to the bedroom, and sat on the edge of the bed. Gina was already lying under the blanket, turned to the wall, reading a magazine. She stirred slightly and looked over her shoulder at him.
He undressed, aware of her gaze, then went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth, disliking what he saw in the mirror.
In bed, he lay with his back to her. A long moment passed where it seemed they were simply listening to each other breathe.
“I want you,” he said. “I want you close.”
She gave an exasperated sigh. “I’m sorry. I just can’t—not right now. Tomorrow morning?”
“Don’t know if I could concentrate with this.” He put his hand to his chest. “My heart keeps skipping beats.”
“Look, Wolfie, I know I’m no help. But I can’t stand being around worry over sickness. Not now, okay? When we were living here with Mom and RJ, and then just with Mom, that was the thing. I didn’t even realize it until she’d moved south, and suddenly we didn’t have the constant talk about all the little upsets and changes in her body. I mean, really, that’s been my whole growing up. And I can’t take it. I don’t know how RJ took it all those years.”
He was silent.
She moved a little closer.
“You still awake?” he asked.
Silence.
He doubted he would sleep. But he must’ve drifted slightly, because when she spoke again, her voice gave him a second’s startlement. “Mother says they’re coming soon, now.”
“To our local theater?”
She didn’t respond.
“There’s something that’ll reduce the stress level around here.”
“I’m not even sure she and I are still speaking after the last time. But she said, ‘See ya,’ in that way she has.”
“I shouldn’t make jokes,” he said. “We love Louisa.”
“Well, let’s don’t go overboard.”
They laughed quietly. It was a taste of their usual way with each other, and it thrilled him. “You gonna be all right alone with her while I’m gone all day? I’ve got meetings and dealing with contractors at the theater all day Saturday. And Frye’s gonna be putting the new budget together and interviewing effects companies. I’ll have to sit in on some demonstrations.”
Eyes still closed, she said, “Where do you think I’ve been, Thaddeus? We’re all buried in set work, for all three shows. Jesus.”
“I’m just saying what I’ll be doing all day Saturday, babe.”
“Well, Louisa can fend for herself a little. And she’ll have her boyfriend with her.”
He said nothing for a moment. Then: “Beau?”
“Cut it out,” she said with a little smirk.
He waited.
“That couple across the street,” she said. “Those friends of hers, they need a house sitter.”
“She’s not gonna stay here?”
“They need a house sitter. That’s how she broached the subject of coming up.”
“What about the dog?”
“The dog’ll stay with somebody down there, I guess. But the reverend’s coming. Another kind of dog. When she calls me now, he’s always there. The Right Reverend Whitcomb.”
“From the ministry of St. Sebastian of the Corrective Shoes,” said Thaddeus. It was a name she had made up for the man.
She gave a little scoffing laugh, then spoke through a yawn, “Yeah. The ubiquitous Rightwing Reverend Whitcomb. The man who thinks Jesus is a Republican.”
After another pause, he said, “Let’s at least plan the dog’s demise.”
She sighed. “Do you know how many times that rodent has bit me over the last seven years? And to think of it: a fucking dog named Marcel.”
Now we’re ourselves, he thought. “I have an image of the first time I met Louisa,” he offered. “Sitting in her lounge chair with that other one, Tunk, nestled on her lap, snapping and snarling at anyone who got within ten feet, including RJ. I thought that was the lapdog of all lapdogs, until Marcel.”
“I wonder if something in her personality engenders that snappishness in her pets.”
“There’s not a mean bone in the lady’s body, Gina.”
“You get along with her better than I do.”
“I love her as my friend and also as my mother-in-law.”
“If only she liked me as well as she likes you.”
“She loves you.”
They were quiet again. Sleep began stealing over him, and suddenly, she began crying. The sound seemed to come out of his half sleep.
He reached over her and turned the light on. “Gina?”
“Don’t,” she said. “Turn it off. I’m just so desperately tired, and I need sleep.”
But it seemed that she had been sleeping so soundly during his wakeful turns in the nights; he had watched her in his own sleeplessness. He turned the light off, and then lay close, propping himself on one elbow, gingerly running his hand along her hip. She remained still, and in a little while he heard her slow sleep-breathing. The light was still on. Leaning up and carefully reaching past her, he turned the light off, then lay back, resting his hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t,” she said.
He turned, sighing without sound. She stirred only a little, pulled the blanket high, up to her ears, and was still. A little later, he murmured, “Gina?”
Silence, just the sleep-sighing.
He closed his eyes and kept his head straight so as not to have his ear against the pillow. He could feel the cognac. He waited, sleepless, aware of his pulse, resolving not to attend to it, or to her shifts in mood and tone. And then abruptly knowing, in a discouraging shift of his thoughts, like a door opening on a cold winter night, that he was going to have to find a way to seem not to be watching her too closely. He would add an hour before getting out of bed in the morning, let her go in alone, try seeming not to worry every minute—as of course he was. He whispered under his breath, “Ridiculous.”
He looked at the little too-bright window of his cell phone: the news was terrible. The whole world was going on with its mayhem all the time. He couldn’t sleep, and then he kept drifting in and out fitfully. At first light, she rose and started getting ready. “Come on,” she said.
“Gonna take a little time this morning,” he told her.
“You’re okay,” she said. It sounded like an opinion. “And aren’t you the lucky one.” She came over and kissed the side of his face and then left without saying more. He heard her drive off. He sat in the kitchen and read the paper—the sports page—but his mind wandered. It was just a matter of this malaise of hers. She hadn’t shown or betrayed interest in anyone else. He was beginning to feel anxious again. He thought how it would be, how things might improve somehow, with Louisa in town.
He was indeed fond of the old lady. Even when she was in one of her panics, she was unfailingly interesting, every bit as good a storyteller as her husband had been. At seventy-eight, she still smoked and drank whiskey. RJ himself had consumed almost half a fifth a day, starting with a dry Manhattan around noon, and going on slowly into the late evenings. She often joined him for the whole ride, from noon to closing, as she put it. When Gina was a child, on visits down in Oxford to that little house where Louisa now lived (which had belonged to Louisa’s father, Bo Talbot, the unassuming former mayor of Oxford, who had made it a point to live like any average citizen and who had known Faulkner), RJ and the old man spent sweet slow hours sitting on the porch, drinking Manhattans, telling stories, and laughing. Louisa believed whiskey kept both men alive longer. Bo Talbot died quietly in his sleep at one hundred and five years and fifteen days old, the summer before last. He had outlived RJ, who was nearly twenty years younger. RJ made it to eighty-six.
When she had gone south in order to be with and care for Bo, she talked about how she was starting to believe helping someone in need was a possible cure for her afflictions, meaning her bouts of hysteria (though the ER trips always reassured her and gave her new energy).
Thaddeus had joked with her, “I’m gonna miss you and your afflictions, lady.” But his voice almost broke as he said it.
Malcolm
When the acting camp ended, on the tenth, he had his first meeting with the visiting director. The office door was open. Frye waved him in; hewas standing at a high drafting table with blueprints spread out on it, beside an ornate, old-fashioned telephone. He pointed to it. “Like this? Toscano 1929 Antique Brittany. I bought it in Italy a couple years ago. Makes me feel like I could talk to the dead if I really wanted to.”
“Must feel strange, dialing numbers.”
“Have a seat.” Frye moved behind the desk in front of the window.
There were prompt books and playscripts on shelves along three of the walls of the room, which smelled of leather and mimeograph ink and wood. The visiting director was a shadow now, with the sunlight in the window behind him. He wore a white suit and a white shirt with a red bow tie. On the desk was a white panama hat. “Good to see you,” he said with his odd smirk (perhaps it had to do with his eyebrows, which were darker than his hair, and arched, giving him a faintly sardonic look). “Good work with the acting camp.”
“Thanks. It was fun.” Malcolm glanced at the hat.
“Got a lunch today,” Frye said. “With the Cosmetics Tycoons, our money supply. Gotta look my best.”
“I wondered if I could talk to you about my niece.”
“Uh-oh. What’s happened now?”
Of course, Frye knew everything. Malcolm took a breath. Then: “Nothing’s happened. I had the thought that she might—”
The other gave a little simpering laugh. “You’re kidding.”
