At the theater, Mr. Gregory was, of course, waiting for us. He looked pretty nervous too. He bundled us inside like we were two hours late instead of two hours early. He sent Lil into the dressing room so that she could start becoming Helen Burns. I didn't have to do anything. If you're offstage, you can shriek like an insane woman who has been locked in an attic for a great many years without looking like an insane woman who has been locked in an attic for a great many years.
So I read Our Town—terrific—while Lil got ready, and my mother and Mr. and Mrs. Spicer went for a walk in Times Square because they couldn't bear to wait in the theater, they said. And besides, my mother had never seen Times Square.
And that is why they were not around when Mr. Gregory came looking for them.
"They're out for a walk," I said.
His face looked like Disaster.
"What?" I said.
Mrs. Windermere happened to make her theater appearance right then. Blue dress flouncing, a couple of hundred strands of pearls draped around her, an ivory cane that she didn't really need. "Gregory," she said, "this is the night!"
Mr. Gregory looked at her.
"What's happened?" she said.
"Come with me," he said.
"What's going on?" I said.
"Everything's fine," said Mrs. Windermere.
Sure.
They were gone a long time.
While I waited to see how fine everything was, I watched the theater fill up through this little hole in the stage wings. Mrs. Windermere said that she had never had a play open without a packed house, and it looked like she was going to keep her stats perfect. The Rose was filling up pretty fast, and it wasn't filling up with just anybody, I'm not lying. Mayor Lindsay came down the aisle, shaking hands with everyone who could reach him and smiling like this was a parade or something. And a little after him came Jimmy Stewart. Really. Jimmy Stewart, walking down and shaking hands too, with those huge hands he has. Jimmy Stewart!
But you know what? That was nothing.
I saw my mother and Lil's parents come in and sit in the second row, and then Mr. Gregory going out to see them, and them all getting up and heading backstage—I guess to wish me and Lil good luck one more time. And then, right near where their seats were, guess who came in and sat down. Just sat down, real easy, and crossed his legs and leaned back and looked up at the ceiling a couple of times and then turned around to someone and shook his hand and then turned around to someone else and took his program and signed it. You know who this was?
Joe Pepitone.
I'm not lying. Joe Pepitone was sitting in the second row of the Rose Theater.
Joe Pepitone.
And you know what I was going to do? I was going to shriek like an insane woman who has been locked in an attic for a great many years.
In front of Joe Pepitone.
You know what that feels like?
You can't know what that feels like, because no one has ever had to shriek like an insane woman who has been locked in an attic for a great many years in front of Joe Pepitone.
I couldn't do it.
I wouldn't do it.
Not in front of Joe Pepitone.
I looked through the little hole in the stage wings again. He was reading his program. He was probably getting to the part where it said, Voice of Bertha Mason: Douglas Swieteck. Any second now he was going to lean over to someone near him and point to my name. Isn't that a guy? he was going to say. How can a guy play the voice of Bertha Mason? Then he was going to look at my name again, and he was going to say, You know, that name sounds familiar. And then he was going to think about it some more, and he'd say, That name is so familiar. And then, then, then he was going to remember.
Terrific.
I looked around wildly.
And suddenly, there were my mother and Mr. and Mrs. Spicer. And Mr. Gregory and Mrs. Windermere. And Lil—who was taking her turn looking like Disaster.
"We've got to get out of here," I said.
Mrs. Spicer nodded. "We know, we know. We're going to take her to the hospital right away."
Her? Hospital?
"We think it might be the pencils," said Mr. Spicer.
Lil smiled, sort of. She was holding on to her parents pretty tight. She had been crying. "Break a leg," she said. She was still crying.
"Break a leg?" I said.
"It's what is said to actors before they go on stage," said Mr. Gregory.
"On stage?" I said.
Lil tried to smile again. "Remember, Doug, it's Scatcherd."
I shook my head. "I'm not going onstage."
My mother put both her hands up to her face.
Mrs. Windermere came and stood beside me. She put one hand on my shoulder and another on my elbow. "Who else knows all the lines for Helen Burns?" she said.
I looked at her. I looked at Mr. Gregory. At my mother. Then Mr. and Mrs. Spicer. Then Lil. "Break a leg," she said again, sort of weak.
"He'll be fine," said Mrs. Windermere.
"No," I said.
"We've got to get you to the dressing room," said Mr. Gregory.
"No, no," I said again.
You remember who is sitting in the audience? In the second row?
"You do know the lines, don't you?" said Mr. Gregory.
"No," I said.
"He's lying," said Lil.
"If we were to tie his hair up into a bun..."
A bun!
"...and some baby powder to make his face pale..."
Baby powder!
"Did you know that Joe Pepitone is sitting out there?"
"A great many people are sitting out there," said Mr. Gregory.
Lil grimaced, but not because of Joe Pepitone. "I think we'd better..."
The Spicers left. Lil's stomach was hurting so bad, she didn't even look back.
Mr. Gregory and Mrs. Windermere took me to the dressing room. "This is what we have to work with," they said to a whole lot of people who began to smile at me a whole lot—and they weren't the kind of smiles that make you happy.
"Listen," I said, "if this is just because of a stomachache—"
" Remember," Mrs. Windermere said—people were starting to tie my hair up into a bun—"Jane Eyre will walk across the stage and address you. You'll be reading a book on a bench. Jane won't speak to you until you turn the page, so don't forget to turn it. Then she'll say, 'Is your book interesting?' and you say ... Skinny Delivery Boy, you say..."
"Nope, it stinks."
"Doug," said Mrs. Windermere.
"I say, 'I like it,' and she says, 'What is it about?' and I hand it to her and say, 'You may look at it.'"
By this time, my hair was tied up in a bun. A tight bun. And someone was powdering the back of my neck.
"Could you go out there and tell Joe Pepitone to go home?" I said.
"And when she says, 'Do you like the teachers here at Lowood Institution?' you say..."
"They stink too."
Mrs. Windermere looked at me. Hard.
"They're all criminally insane?"
I think Mr. Gregory was about to start crying right there, even though it wasn't him that was getting his hair tied up in a bun—which, by the way, hurts. "You have to get this right!" Mr. Gregory said.
And I think it was the have to that gave me the idea, even as someone told me to raise my arms so she could slip a long Lowood Institution dress over me, which didn't exactly help the bun.
"Mrs. Windermere," I said, "I know the part. But this changes things."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, Lil and I were getting the Snowy Heron for this, right?"
She nodded, a little suspicious.
"If I'm going to play Helen Burns in front of Joe Pepitone, then I want the Red-Throated Divers too."
Mrs. Windermere opened her eyes wide. I mean, really wide. "I've had those Divers for years," she said.
I waited.
"That wasn't part of our agreement."
I waited.
"They're perfect over the mantel."
"They're perfect back in the book," I said.
She shook her head. "Absolutely not. Do you realize how much that plate costs?"
I waited some more.
"Agreed," said Mr. Gregory.
There it was.
Mrs. Windermere looked at him the way an insane woman who has been locked in an attic for a great many years would look at him. "It's not your decision, Gregory," she said.
"It's my theater, it's my production, it's my reputation, and it's my money," said Mr. Gregory. He held out his hand. I shook it.
"I could use a bowl of lemon ice cream," said Mrs. Windermere.
I'm not lying, I was a killer Helen Burns.
I stepped out on to that stage like I was the Great Esquimaux Curlew. When Jane Eyre came to look at my book—which happened to be Our Town—I handed it to her just right. When Miss Scatcherd told me I never cleaned my nails, I was about as quiet and innocent as a Large-Billed Puffin. When she hit me a dozen times with a bunch of twigs, I was the Brown Pelican: I didn't bat an eye—and you try getting hit a dozen times with a bunch of twigs. And when I had to die, people were crying. Really. And you know why? Because I was the Black-Backed Gull, and so people cried like Helen Burns was their best friend.
Maybe even Joe Pepitone was crying. Who knows?
And Mr. Gregory was crying too. Probably in relief. You should have heard the clapping as the curtain came down on dead Helen Burns. When I got to the wings, Mr. Gregory picked me up and hugged me and twirled me around and got baby powder all over himself and I had to tell him to let me go since I was headed back to the dressing room because I wasn't going to be Helen Burns any longer than I had to and was someone going to help me get this stupid bun untied?
By the way, you can guess what my mother was doing in the wings.
But the best part was still to come!
Maybe it was because of the Helen Burns applause. Or maybe it was all the practice. Or maybe it was because Joe Pepitone was in the second row. But I let out the Bertha Mason shriek, and by the time the first echoes finished bouncing back from the mezzanine, I wasn't the only one in the Rose Theater who was shrieking. It was that good. I bet that everyone there really did think that there was an insane woman who had been locked in the attic of the theater for a great many years and they had just heard her.
I guess the rest of the play was all right. I spent some of it reading Our Town and some of it working on the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States report, which was almost finished even though a certain someone hadn't written a single word and now she would probably say that she was so sick that she couldn't write a thing.
Terrific.
But I'm not lying, what I was thinking about more was a certain book, and certain missing pages, and bringing those pages back to a certain library, and handing them to a certain librarian, and me and Lil watching him put them back.
I know what the Red-Throated Divers are watching for. I know what the next spectacular thing is.
By the time we got to the "Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present" part, it was almost eleven o'clock, and Mrs. Windermere still had to drive my mother and me back home, which meant it would be almost one o'clock before I even got close to sleep. But I didn't care. I'd finished laying the last transcontinental rail and pounded in the Golden Spike, and the audience was standing and hollering, and the next day, I'd be handing two Audubon prints to Mr. Powell.
What could be better?
Who cares if Mrs. Windermere was taking forever being The Playwright out in the lobby? Who cares if she was holding my mother beside her like her new best friend?
What could be better?
And about then, Joe Pepitone came backstage.
He really did. Joe Pepitone. Backstage.
"Hey, kid," he said.
I looked at him. Joe Pepitone.
"Doug, right?"
I nodded. Joe Pepitone.
"I threw with you last fall. You still got my cap?"
I nodded. Joe Pepitone.
He laughed. A laugh that only Joe Pepitone could laugh. "I saw your name in the program. So you were the guy who shrieked offstage."
I nodded.
"You know, kid, you almost made me wet my pants."
I laughed. He laughed. I tried to laugh like him.
"And you were Helen Burns too."
My heart stopped. You know what it means when your heart stops? It means that when you think that nothing could be better, right about then, it all falls apart. If you remember, I told you that a long time ago.
I nodded. "Yup," I said.
He shook his head. Big smile. "You were great," he said. "You had me bawling, even though I knew it was you. Bawling, kid." He shook his head again. "Man," he said, "I wish I had your talent. You had the whole house tonight." Then he held out his program.
"I already have one," I said.
He laughed again. "It's not for you, kid. It's for me. I want you to sign it." He opened it up to where my name was. "Right there," he said, and handed me a pen from his inside pocket like he had put it there on purpose just so I could sign a program for him.
So I did.
"And write something for Horace too," he said.
So I did.
Here's what I wrote: For Joe and Horace. Thanks. Your friend, Doug.
Joe Pepitone took the program back and looked at it. "Thanks for what?" he said.
"Everything," I said.
Mrs. Windermere drove us back home really late. But you might say that we were both more than a little happy, mostly because Mr. Gregory had called Jane Eyre a smash, and told us it was going to have a long run, and so Mrs. Windermere was flying high. I was too, but mostly because Mr. Gregory had promised that if I stayed on as understudy, he would find another actor—actress—to play Helen Burns until Lil came back. Fine by me.
And you know what Mr. Gregory had given me and was now rolled up in a long tube in the back of the car?
My mother and Mrs. Windermere and I sang about living in yellow submarines the whole way back, through Manhattan, across the Whitestone, and all the way up to Marysville. Sometimes when you keep singing the same song again and again and again, it gets really boring. Really, really boring. But not on that drive. It got funnier and funnier, so we finally had to stop singing around Middletown because I thought that Mrs. Windermere was going to drive off the road, that's how hard she was laughing. My mother was about crying.
When we got back home, all the lights were on in the living room. We opened the door, and when we came in, Lucas and Christopher were there, sitting and looking at us.
"How did it go?" Christopher said.
"Fabulous." I told them about Joe Pepitone. I told them about the shrieking. And I even told them about playing Helen Burns, which I hadn't intended to tell them.
"We know about Helen Burns," said Lucas.
"How?" I said.
Lucas looked down.
"Mrs. Spicer called a little while ago," said Christopher. "From a hospital in the city."
"Did she tell you that Lil got a stomachache from eating her pencils?" I said.
My mother took my hand.
"Little brother," Lucas said, "it isn't a stomachache."
And the Yellow Shank finally walked into the full dark.
CHAPTER TEN
The Arctic Tern
HERE IS THE STAT that the doctors gave Mr. and Mrs. Spicer:
One in four.
That's the last stat I'm going to give you, because so what? So what? Stats don't mean anything.
Every time Joe Pepitone steps up to the plate, it's new. It doesn't matter if he's hit five hundred home runs or if he's struck out five hundred times. It's a new thing. And no one can predict what's going to happen, except that he's Joe Pepitone, and he's going to try his darnedest, and he's not going to let anything get him down, and he's going to fight his way through no matter what, a
nd he's got all his friends behind him, and if you don't think that matters a whole lot, then you don't know how to get from first base to second.
Because stats don't mean anything.
On the first Saturday of June, I got to Spicer's Deli early, since I figured Mr. Spicer would need my help because Lil wouldn't be there to load the wagons. I was right. When I got there, the first wagon wasn't even close to loaded. Mr. Spicer was standing in the back, one hand holding the orders, the other messing up his hair.
"I can do that," I said.
"Lil usually does it," Mr. Spicer said.
"I know."
I took the lists from his hand.
"Doug," he said, "I'm going to have to let you go. The hospital bills, you can't believe what they're going to be. I don't have enough to pay you anymore."
"I don't have anything else to do on Saturday mornings," I said.
I know. What a chump.
But Mr. Spicer, he looked at me a long time. Then he nodded. Hand back to hair. He went out front.
I loaded the first wagon.
At Mrs. Mason's house, she handed me an envelope with the money for the groceries and another twenty dollars. "For the little girl," she said.
Mr. Loeffler was waiting for me with a glass jar full of yellow tulips. "Will you see the little girl sometime soon?" he said. "Would you mind..." And he handed me the tulips.
All the Daugherty kids were waiting for me when I got to their house, sitting on the front stoop. They were all holding pictures they had drawn—of Lil getting better. In Ben's she was jumping over a fence. In Polly's she was riding her bike with the stupid basket in front of the library. In Joel's she was flying over Washington Irving Junior High School. In Davie's she was reading a huge stack of books under a tree. And in Phronsie's she was kissing someone. "Who is she kissing?" I said. They all started to giggle.
Me, I was almost a chump. Almost bawling in front of kids.
At Mrs. Windermere's, she was waiting too. She opened the door into the kitchen, and we put the groceries away, and I asked how the play was going, and she said it was going fabulous. And I asked about the girl Mr. Gregory got to replace Lil and she said she was fine but not nearly as good as Lil. And I asked about the shrieking, which I wasn't doing anymore since if I was going down to New York City it wasn't to be in a play, and Mrs. Windermere said someone else was doing it now. She wasn't sure who.
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