The Tall Boy: A Memoir

by Jess Gregg

  He wore long trousers and slicked his hair straight back, and went to junior high. He did not get mad when he found me playing in his garage, but he did not smile. I had never talked to grown boys before. Or rather, they had never talked to me. Except Dexter Hasbrook didn’t really talk, he just whispered, and looked back over his shoulder. He took out his thing, and wanted to put it in my mouth. I didn’t want to. So he sat down on a box, and pulled me onto his lap. He opened my pants and rubbed my thing with his handkerchief. It did not hurt, but after a while I got tired of it, and went home.

  I forgot all about him after Jonie moved next door to our house. She was from Seattle, the same age as me, five going on six, with yellow hair cut in bangs. “Blonde, blonde, as a willow wand,” Bauma sang. I do not know why she liked Jonie, because she used slang all the time, and was sassy. Her mother and father were divorced. She had a big box of crayons, and when we played together, she drew red crayola on her lips.

  We found some shelf paper in my room, and cut out a lady twice as tall as we were. Then we scribbled her face pink, and her dress blue and orange, and Jonie told me about the boys in Seattle peeing up against trees. We started talking about it, and then, somehow, we got on the bed and took our clothes off.

  I had nearly always known how different little boys were from little girls, but it had never occurred to me before that, the way she went in and the way I stuck out, we could fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. When we mashed them together, they sort of did. Except this is when Bauma opened the bedroom door and looked in.

  Jonie tried to hide behind the pillow, and I did too, but I could see the expression on Bauma’s face. It was a doozer. She ordered Jonie to put on her clothes and go home at once. I got very upset when she said she would have to tell my mother. I told her if she did, I wouldn’t be an architect, I’d be a burglar. She said she didn’t much care what I did now, and that made me so mad, I reached up and gave her string of amber beads a yank. They went bouncing all over the floor. I don’t remember if we picked them up.

  I do remember I wasn’t allowed to play with Jonie after that. “Find someone else to play with,” Bauma told me. I said there were no other children around, and she said, “What about Dexter Hasbrook?” So I went back to his garage.

  Dexter Hasbrook never smiled, but when I did what he wanted, he stroked my head.

  17

  LIFE PRESERVER

  Two and a half days before we were due to arrive in New York, the ship ran into rough weather. It was late December, so I had expected a certain amount of storm; but nothing like this. It wasn’t the season or latitude for tropical hurricanes, and yet the plunging of the liner suggested we were heading straight into one.

  Even when I got over my seasickness, visions of disaster kept following me around. At least I was able to fake a look of unconcern—these last months in England had rehearsed me in hiding what I felt. My final day in London, I had even managed to write Christmas cards to the cast of the play, as if cheer were natural and possible. The fact is, I was still dazed from a buffeting equal to anything the ship was taking now.

  Somehow, routine persisted. A steward tapping his chimes in the corridor announced dinner, and it occurred to me that the sensation in my stomach just might be hunger. I had not eaten all day, and images of the French Line’s famous cuisine began to nag me. Holding onto the bunk with one hand, I managed to shave and dress. Then, pausing frequently to counterbalance some particularly surprising declivity and drop, I made my way up to the dining salon.

  The great room was nearly vacant. Not many people had booked passage for the winter crossing anyway, and those who had were clearly not interested in food that night. The table for eight, where I had been seated at previous meals, was empty. That was fine with me; I was in no mood to talk to anyone. The maitre d’hotel had ideas of his own, however, and steered me toward a small table where a man my own age was sitting alone.

  He acknowledged me courteously enough, rising and murmuring his name. Even so, I sensed I was intruding. As it was too late to back out now, I sat down. “Simon,” which was all I had heard of his name, resumed studying his menu, and I took refuge behind mine. And so we sat. No one came to take our orders—only a few waiters had shown up for work that night. The silence at our table became conspicuous, and I told myself it was just possible the man didn’t speak English. While he looked quite British—trim at forty, with impeccable tailoring, and neatly clipped sandy hair—his eyes put a doubt in my mind. Dark and brooding, they might have peered out of a bazaar at Marrakesh.

  More to test his comprehension than crack his silence, I asked, “Will this be your first visit to the States?”

  The ripe-olive eyes lifted for an instant. “First? Oh, not at all.”

  His inflection and accent were sheer Belgrave Square. So was his reserve. I made another attempt. “Going there on business?”

  “Textiles,” he said. His hand clamped down on his silverware to keep it from sliding about the table, and the silence resumed.

  So fuck him, I thought. Let him choke on his privacy, if that’s what he wants. I smiled at an empty table across the room as if returning someone’s greeting, so he could see I was appreciated elsewhere, if not here.

  Not until coffee did our eyes meet again. He sighed to himself, as though tyrannized by his training. “And you?” he asked. “What profession are you in?”

  I faltered a moment, unsure if I still wanted to claim it. “Theatre,” I said.

  He turned the word over in his mind. “Actor?”

  “Oh, much further down the social scale. At the very bottom. I write the damn pieces.”

  Only I didn’t say it aloud. Actually, I was saved from answering at all by a lingering grumble from the depths of the ship. It sounded as if the entire hull was protesting the stress. I forced a smile. “Think it’ll hold together?”

  Impassively, he lifted his shoulders and let them drop. I recognized it instantly, the same spasm-like shrug I had been giving ever since the storm began. Who gives a damn, it said. Who cares if the bloody raft floats or sinks! I wondered suddenly if, along with being on the same ship, this man and I weren’t in the same boat.

  After dinner, I paused in the library, and flipped through the passenger list, hoping to find a name I knew. No one turned up, although just above my own name, I discovered a Simon Gersten. As this was the only Simon I came across, I gathered he was my reluctant dinner partner. A Mrs. Gersten was listed too, but she was still unaccounted for when I ran into him an hour later in the empty bar. Surprisingly, he asked me to join him. “Tell the barman what you drink,” he suggested.

  I ordered ginger ale, and then suddenly changed it to bourbon and water. Why not? The play was closed now, and I no longer needed to be on the wagon. I had never been a heavy drinker, but the wisdom of being utterly clear-headed had become apparent as soon as I arrived in London and met the director. He was a year or two younger than I, perhaps thirty-eight, fleshly, but not unattractive. He looked like a Hawaiian prince. He ranked himself not less than that, too. At a West End chop house where we went to discuss the rehearsal schedule, I lightly mentioned “someday when we’ve both arrived—” His head tipped back slightly. “I have already arrived,” he said unsmilingly. Perhaps it was true, although I was unfamiliar with his reputation. At all events, I let the matter drop then, but privately intended to tease him about it when I knew him better.

  As it happened, I never did know him any better. Although I had written The Seashell, my status in the production turned out to be the same as the typist who had done up the scripts. Once I had met the cast and heard the first reading, I was made to understand I would not be welcome at the rehearsals. When I persisted in coming to the theatre anyway, it might as well have been Coventry.

  I would have been quite alone in London, except for the understudies. They were regarded as non-persons too, but shrugged it off with sass, and welcomed me at the pub where they gathered after rehearsal. Then even this door beg
an to close on me. I faced down Ray, the blond understudy from Paddington, and asked him why the hospitality was cooling. “Well, you’re not really one of us, Jesse,” he said. “Maybe you’re religious or something, but you always sit there cold sober while the rest of us are makin’ drunken fools of ourselves. Makes us feel you’re passing judgments on us.”

  For once, my clear-headedness paid off. “But how could I pass judgments on anyone?” I cried. “I’m an alcoholic! That’s why I can’t drink with you.”

  It wasn’t true, but it made sense. And it worked! That night, when I joined the group at the pub, three sympathetic hands reached out to pour my ginger ale for me.

  The uneven motion of the Liberte gave a double kick to the bourbon now, making me feel giddy; but several drinks seemed to have had no effect on Simon.

  Even sitting back in his chair, with his legs crossed and a glass in his hand, he gave the impression of standing stiffly at attention. I asked him if he had been in the army, and he almost smiled. “The RAF,” he said. “But I should have been in the navy. Even when it gets bloody like this, I thrive on the sea.”

  “Apparently your wife does not,” I said.

  He examined his glass with a slight frown. “No,” he replied. “She doesn’t.”

  He finished his scotch, and signaled the barman for another. Our conversation lapsed again. For a time, I tried to carry it alone, but finally gave up, and bid him a pleasant goodnight. His glance traveled up the length of my necktie, and fixed on my chin. There seemed to be no light in his eyes at all, and I realized he must be very drunk. “You’re a homosexual, I should guess,” he said suddenly.

  I looked at him in surprise, but did not reply. He nodded my answer for me, and added, “First of your ilk I’ve ever met.”

  “If that’s true,” I said, “you couldn’t have gone to a very good school.”

  “Just Cambridge.”

  “Then believe me, Simon,” I said, “you’ve met quite a few of us.”

  Giving a slight bow, conventional staging for an acerbic exit, I returned to my cabin. Not to sleep, of course—the wildness of the sea would have prevented that—but to lick my wounds, all of them. Around three o’clock, I apparently dozed off, and when I awoke in the morning, had coffee in my cabin as a precaution against running into Simon at breakfast.

  However, the ship that had looked so vast when I boarded it in Southampton, was too small to avoid anyone for long. While I was attempting to walk along the Promenade Deck, I saw him coming toward me. I tried to pass by with lowered eyes, but he turned and fell into step beside me. “I say, old man, I’m most dreadfully sorry,” he said. “About last night, I mean. I’d had a rotten setback, and I expect I was just striking out at anyone.”

  “Quite all right,” I said, but coolly.

  “Fact is,” he persisted, “when I said I’d never met your kind before, I wasn’t telling the truth. Had a close friend when I was eighteen, who probably was.” He considered the statement, then amended it. “Who surely was. Not that he and I ever got around to anything, y’know. I was too conformist. Still am, I expect. Anyway, that’s what my wife tells me.”

  This was more than he had said at any one time since we had met. The wonder was that he managed to get the words out consecutively, for the roughness of the sea kept us staggering away from each other until we had to link arms to get the conversation finished. “Do you still see him?” I asked. “This boyhood friend?”

  He shook his head. “He was an officer on the H.M.S. Hood during the war.”

  “He was lost?”

  “Nearly all of them aboard were.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Kind of you to say so.”

  Civilities took the place of conversation, but they were welcome. We parted amiably, and then kept running into each other inadvertently all morning. At the Purser’s office. In the library. At noon, when I came into the dining salon, he beckoned me over to his table. Once more he was sitting alone. “Pull up a chair,” he suggested.

  I did, and asked if his wife was feeling any better. Once more, he made that quick hiccup of a shrug, and the familiar silence resumed. Abruptly, he looked into my face. “My wife isn’t with me,” he said. “She was supposed to be. She even got down to Southampton with me. But at the last moment, decided against sailing.”

  I murmured something, the same kind of low-key all-purpose condolence that people offer when your show closes.

  “Yes,” he echoed. “Rotten luck.”

  He seemed to lose himself in study of the menu, but apparently had forgotten why when the waiter finally came to take his order. With all the wonders of this cuisine to choose from, he asked for some barley soup and a roast beef sandwich. “My second, y’know,” he said. Only for an instant did I think he meant he had had a prior lunch. “Awfully decent girl,” he went on, “but twelve years younger than I. And full of all the new ideas.”

  We attempted another stroll after lunch, and played some cards in the smoking room; but mostly we talked, each laying out his particular rejection like a spread of solitaire. He had been married to her for three years, Margaret, nursery-named Meggie, vivacious, naturally fair-haired, a little spoiled. He could speak of little else, but she didn’t seem very interesting to me. On the other hand, he could not have been much interested in backstage politics, but he listened patiently to my anger, and even showed a rush of color when I mentioned that the star of my play had been the renowned Dame Sybil Thorndike. “Oh, jolly good!” he cried. “I saw her act St. Joan when I was little. Really great old girl, what?”

  Old? It was hard to think of her being so. Although she was far too mature for the role of the mother in The Seashell, and too forthright ever to be that repressive, she always convinced me she was exactly who she set out to be. It was her great gift to find the norm that exists in oddity, and the spectrum hidden in gray. Most people’s first impression of her was the direct blue of her eyes, but for me it was that voice, resonant, almost rumbling, a theatre voice that kept no secrets from the top galleries. The whole cast had assembled on stage, that first morning, when we heard her coming upstairs. Two floors away, every syllable was distinct. “Of course I remember you,” she was telling the doorman. “Of course, of course, I do.” Everyone smiled at each other as if she were a personal achievement. Then she came out into the lights, not tall at all for someone so much larger than life.

  She was always on time, always ready to go. “I get up very early,” she told me once. “Play an hour of Bach at the piano to clear my mind, then give an hour of study to my lines. Or if I’m not in a show, I memorize poetry or music. It’s the memory that wants its daily work-out, y’know. I’m not going to be one of those actresses who hovers up close to the prompter when I’m old.” She was seventy-six then.

  Dame Sybil Thorndike, with Heather Sears, in The Seashell

  Seventy-six, and not wasteful of a moment that could be lived. Having just finished a year’s run in a play, she took two weeks off to relax on a walking tour in Switzerland, and now plunged into rehearsal for The Seashell. Her focus of energy was often tiring to others, but she never made any demands for privilege, never any shows of temperament. Fifty years of stardom had taught her to keep it simple. If one of her lines needed fixing, she showed, by speaking it with too much vigor, that she was having trouble with it. “How would you rather say it, Dame Sybil?” the director asked, once. “Well,” she said, “if nobody minds, I’d rather try it with no lines at all, and see if I can’t say it with me old face.”

  To remember this now was painful, and to no purpose. I wanted to let go of it, and get on with my life. But months would probably be needed before this healed. At least knowing Dame Sybil had been rewarding. She knew I was not happy with the production, and sometimes when we were on tour, she would see me eating alone at the hotel, and ask me to her table. We never discussed the play or its evident problems, but spoke of our lives, the arts, even politics. She shared her stories of working with such d
isparate forces as George Bernard Shaw and Marilyn Monroe. She spoke especially of Sir Laurence Olivier, whom she had helped train, and whose career had since transcended hers. In his Oedipus Rex, she had played his wife/mother in a blood-red wig, a performance I would have given back teeth to have seen. She smiled when I told her so. Suddenly, she leaned across the table, and, playing her part and his too, whispered an entire scene for me. The mood of waiting doom had not left me when she straightened up. “Look,” she laughed, “we’ve let our ice cream melt.”

  During the afternoon, the winds died down. “Ought to get in some exercise, now the storm’s over,” Simon suggested. I didn’t say anything to discourage this belief, but I knew, from having lived in Florida, that such lulls only meant the eye of the storm was passing over, and that soon the winds would resume.

  He and I jogged around the deck several times, and worked out in the gym. Pink-faced and sweating, Simon gave himself over to games as if to block out his own painful thoughts. He tried to teach me deck tennis, but was finally reduced to playing catch with me, inventing obstacles and handicaps for himself to make it more interesting. He was not amused when I called this “Two-handed Rugger.”

  “Oh, do say Rugby,” he begged. “I can’t bear it when people say ‘Rugger’. It’s like calling the Queen ‘Betty’.”

  Simon’s devotion to sports, and especially soccer, set off my obsessive backtracking again, reminding me of the leading man in The Seashell. He had had stage experience before, and small parts in films, but it was in this play that his name went up above the title for the first time: Sean Connery. He was not yet a world property, but there was no doubt in the cast’s mind that the public would make him a major star. Quite apart from that face that made breathing so difficult when he looked you in the eye, he was a beguiling actor, honest and straight forward, with an irresistible humor. Yet on tour, everyone in the production noticed that on Monday nights, his performance never had any clout. A little investigation revealed that right after the Saturday night show, he took a train back to London so he could play ball with his pals on Sunday. His soccer team nearly always won, but the games left him so bruised that, just before performance on Monday night, he used a pain-killer. Unfortunately, this also killed the rough, warm message that made women buy tickets to see him. The stage manager gave him a talking-to, which must have been effective, because the next weekend, he forsook soccer, and channeled everything into that macho performance. Or as one of the stagehands announced in a note pinned to the backstage bulletin board: “Ball is out, balls are back!”