“Not, I assume, for his engaging personality or political wisdom.”
“No,” she said, “I care about him. Like I care about you.”
To be coupled with Debson dampened my spirits and made me feel like a fool sitting there in that stupid sheriff’s outfit. Besides, I had a feeling it was really because she thought he was great in the sack. I excused myself and left the bar.
And having decided that, after all, new friends were more reliable than old flames, I searched out Joely Finn and invited him to come over to the arcade shooting gallery with me. Pistol in hand, I saw myself black-fur caped at dawn in a Russian forest facing Spurgeon at fifty paces. For scoring a bull’s-eye, I won a plastic dish with the profiles of J.F.K., R.F.K., and Martin Luther King stamped on it. As we left, we saw Leila coming up the arcade with the three old Mexican women who hung around the streets in the summer selling weedy flowers to tourists. I ignored her.
Across the theater parking lot, Mittie was sitting over by the creek. He had a rope in his hand and was idly tying a noose in it, untying it, tying it back. Squatting down beside him nonchalantly, Joely and I threw some twigs out into the quick brown current and waited quietly to see if Mittie wanted somebody to talk to. I didn’t imagine he would.
Mittie had been acting very withdrawn and distracted in the last week or so. That was why Wolfstein had taken over directing the melodrama as well as the “real” play. Mittie spent his time up in the lighting booth, or off in his room, or over by the creek, reading book after book about wars. Or he was in the bar drinking. He had hit Maisie and yelled at Davy. They avoided him. So did most everyone else. I didn’t know Mittie well enough to judge how different this was from his normal behavior; I was worried that he realized Leila was reinvolved with Spur, but I didn’t want to say anything about this to Joely because I wasn’t sure he knew. He had never mentioned it.
After a long silence, Mittie looked up moodily and told us that he’d rather be by himself. So we walked on home without him. On the way, Joely said he had found a length of rubber pipe in the trunk of Mittie’s bus.
“Good God,” I said. “He’s acting like he’s going to commit suicide or something. Why doesn’t somebody do something?”
“Like what? What can you do?” Joely shook his head. “He’s been acting like that since I’ve known him. You know, Mittie really wanted to succeed as an actor. It meant everything to him. Now here he is, dependent on his father even for this. Of course, the way actors play with their emotions, you can’t be sure what’s going on. He was the same way about drinking.”
“Which he’s back to,” I pointed out. “And so’s Wolfstein. Is that performance too? With the state his liver is in?”
“I don’t know Mr. Wolfstein as well as I know Mittie Stark,” Joely said. He kicked a piece of gravel, and it spun down into the dirt gutter.
The next afternoon, Leila picked Fitzgerald up at the bus station in Denver and brought him back to Floren Park. He told us he had been elected president of his conference and showed us thirty-six photographs of the assembly hall. He also had two shopping bags of Salt Lake City memorabilia with him, including a quart bottle of the lake water.
Everyone in the company seemed to take to Fitzgerald immediately, and he was quickly at home in his Red Lagoon Players sweatshirt and with his cot at the boarding house. He preferred to live there rather than at the Starks’, so I didn’t really see that much of him, which I occasionally felt guilty about; unnecessarily, for he loved summer stock life. Exciting as politics, he exclaimed.
Mittie put Fitzgerald in charge of the concession stand for the duration of his stay, and it was the only time that part of the business ever showed a profit. Under his management, popcorn soared from a dime to a quarter; the ratio of coffee grains to cups of water shifted to the weak side. Even the company members were now required to pay for their refreshments. Before, we had simply taken Cokes and candy whenever we liked. Now the counter and the freezer were locked, and you had to sign a voucher for whatever you wanted. Fitzgerald was like a relentless Pinkerton man in tracking down apprentices who failed to record what they took or were behind in paying up their I.O.U.s.
Mittie was impressed; he offered to promote Fitzgerald to company business manager if he’d come back the next summer. Mrs. Thurston said he was a very enterprising and sensible young man; her tone implied that these were two of the innumerable qualities one would not expect to find in a Donahue. Sabby Norah lost all interest in Seymour Mink and became noticeably enamoured of Fitzgerald, who, despite his youth, looked quite prepossessing in his seersucker suit as he counted the concession stand receipts every evening.
Seymour Mink was having other troubles as well, more immediately problematic than being usurped in both theater finances and Sabby’s heart by my younger brother. The boarding house apprentices, led by Marlin Owen, had not taken kindly to Seymour when he was deported to their lodging after Mrs. Thurston’s arrival. Sabby was forgiven, but they decided to punish Seymour for ever having lived in the “big house” in the first place.
So a guerrilla campaign began. And barbarism chose sides.
The day after he arrived there, he found all his bedroom furniture carefully arranged in the hall, and his room sprayed with shaving cream. His bed was short-sheeted; a bucket of green paint was dropped on his head; the double-framed photographs of his father and mother disappeared and showed up in the theater lobby as WANTED posters; his shorts showed up on the branches of a tree in the front yard; two mice showed up in his top drawer; and a package of Mexican condoms was sent with his love to Mrs. Thurston.
After suffering a week of such hazing, Seymour told Joely in tears that he was going home to New Jersey. So Joely and I determined on a counteroffensive. (Fitzgerald sided with the company.) We struck directly at the leader of the opposition by sneaking into Marlin’s bedroom while he was sleeping and wiping off his eyebrows and sideburns with Nair Hair Remover.
The feud escalated. Marlin’s girlfriend Margery (who had taken over command since Marlin was reluctant to come out of his room until his eyebrows grew back) put a mousetrap in Joely’s stack of Ramparts magazines and almost cost him a finger. Somebody put cayenne pepper in Fitzgerald’s coffee machine, and customers asked for their money back. Sabby’s old affection for Seymour reared itself, and when Pete Barney, the fat piano player, played wrong notes loudly throughout Seymour’s onstage tenor solo, Sabby sneaked into the shower and snapped a photograph of Pete in naked girth, which she pinned to the theater’s portrait gallery entitled “Before?” We were impressed by her unexpected flair.
Like a chain of firecrackers, the company crackled in a series of cruelties, the herd-supported raze of summer camps, fraternities, of armies.
A weekly discussion of general company business was held regularly after Saturday night dinners, and for these occasions, the home residents came over to join the rest of the company at the boarding house. This boarding house, set back off one of the the town’s gaudy main streets, was a three-storied structure of Victorian gingerbread, yellow with brown latticework, and bordered on two sides by a wide porch. Apart from the Red Lagoon apprentices, there were usually a half-dozen other guests (weekly vacationers or commercial travelers), most of whom, apparently, preferred to eat elsewhere. The landlady, a Mrs. Booter, was the sister-in-law of the local sheriff and the widow of a man whose photographs, citations, and personal effects decorated her dim parlor.
In the dining room were two long wooden tables. Mittie always sat at the head of one for these business dinners; Leila sat at the other. Nathan Wolfstein ate at a small separate table, where he had lately and enthusiastically been joined each week by Mrs. Thurston. On the Saturday after “Operation Seymour” began, Mittie sat at his table morosely drinking tequila, so Leila opened the meeting. She began with an exordium regarding the feud and, with some annoyance, addressed herself to our presumed common sense and incipient maturity,
and called for an end to hostilities. She acted as though she were about fifty years old, and somehow managed to pull it off, to the extent that everyone seemed to feel a little sheepish. So, after a brief parlay, the denuded Marlin shook hands with the green-haired Seymour, and a cease-fire was declared.
During this conference, an elderly, soiled waiter, assisted by the cook, an equally depressing middle-aged woman, served our food. (Mrs. Booter generally ate alone in her mausoleum to Her Departed.) Both her assistants looked on the company with suspicious hostility and frank curiosity; it was obvious that they considered us potentially dangerous. And one had to agree with Mrs. Thurston that neither the clothing, the language, nor the table manners of the apprentices were of the most refined quality.
For one thing, because the food was neither plentiful nor appetizing, the collective idea seemed to be to get down as much of it as you could before the taste hit you. We who were used to eating at home under Mrs. Thurston’s eager hand, however, appreciated at least being able to finish our meals—whatever their quality—before the plates were snatched away. And so, despite the savor, we tended to proceed at a more leisurely pace than the regular boarders.
For that reason, as Marlin and Seymour were affirming their treaty by leaving the room side by side, I was still trying to soften up my stolid tapioca pudding by beating it with my spoon. A door slammed. And Spurgeon Debson appeared in the dining hall.
Chapter 12
I Assist at an Explosion
There seemed to be some sort of automatic emote mechanism in Spur which went into effect whenever he was confronted with a gathering of one or more persons.
Here was a whole roomful.
“What a picture! The sons and daughters of New Rochelle and San Clemente. Stuffing our little shiny faces while kids starve in the ghettos. Groovy!”
Joely spoke for everyone, “Why not cram it, Spur?”
I looked at Mittie and at Leila. Leila looked at Spur. Mittie looked at his plate. Mrs. Thurston tapped her napkin to her mouth, then folded it and replaced it on the table, and looked around for the hospital attendants and the police. Everyone else watched the principals.
Spur pulled two handfuls of silver jewelry from his blue jeans pockets and flung them onto the table nearest him. A necklace landed in the bowl of stewed tomatoes.
“Okay,” he said to the assembled young ladies of the company, “Put ’em on. I’m closing out the business. Remarkable, isn’t it? Me! Hammering out trinkets to stick in the fat ears of infantile chicks! Wow!” He shook his head vigorously over this amazing situation, weaving it like a maddened bull labyrinthed with unappetizing maidens.
“What is going on?” Mrs. Thurston asked Nathan Wolfstein.
He replied in an almost dreamy tone, “The playwright’s back, it seems, and he’s high…it seems.”
Mrs. Thurston did not seem to consider this a satisfactory explanation.
High or not, Spur was certainly not looking his best that evening. His cheeks were flushed, perspiration beaded his face, and his pupils were as large as a night cat’s.
Suddenly he slammed his fist down on the table and began yelling, “Who do you people think you are? Do you think you know what the theater is all about? People like me sweating in pain writing the TRUTH about this garbagepile world; but no, you couldn’t be bothered putting my plays on, you’re too busy wiping your baby-pink asses on COTTON CANDY!!!”
Mrs. Thurston again asked Wolfstein for information: “Would somebody mind telling me what is hap-pening? Who is this person? Is he un-bal-anced?”
“Lady,” Spur said to her, “you want to ask your palsied pal there to stuff his snot rag in your stupid mouth?”
But that was not what she wanted to do. Insanity had never frightened Mrs. Thurston any more than cows frighten people who have been raised on dairy farms. She stood up and shook her head. “I really think this has gone far enough,” she told us. “Mittie, call the proprietor!”
Spur opened his mouth, then closed it. His eyes widened with a startled look, then he lurched forward, fell to the floor, and cracked his head on the edge of the dinner table as he slumped down. Someone screamed. Leila jumped up. So did Mittie, who called out her name sharply. “Leila. Don’t!” She looked at him puzzledly and frowned. Then she knelt down beside Spur. He was conscious and rubbing his forehead; his eyes were blank. She helped him to his feet and stood supporting him.
“Leila!” Mittie called again. “Don’t do it. I mean it, Leila. If you don’t get away from him, that’s it!”
He kept saying more of the same as Leila braced Spur with her arm and walked him out of the room. Then Mittie just stood there at the head of the table until Joely came over, soothed his shoulder, and sat him down.
Wolfstein said that the meeting was adjourned, and the company should be at the theater in one hour. Most shuffled out quietly. Everyone was embarrassed. At his little table, Wolfstein poured himself a drink from a pocket flask. Mrs. Thurston was too absorbed to notice, much less advise him against this misuse of alcohol. She walked over to Mittie.
“Would you please explain this situation to me?” she asked him. “I do think, as a mother, I have a right to ask. What is my daughter’s involvement with that…deranged person?”
Joely answered her. “It’s nothing to get upset about, Mrs. Thurston. We’ve had some trouble with that guy, but he isn’t going to hurt anybody. Leila’s just trying to smooth things over, that’s all.”
Mittie gave a short, high, ugly laugh. Joely motioned for me to get Mrs. Thurston away. But before I could maneuver her out of the room, Mittie began in brittle gasps. “Amanda,” he wheezed, “when you raised that bitch, you raised a class-A whore.”
She turned back against my lead. “Mittie! What is the matter with you? I never heard you talking in such a way in all the years I’ve known you.”
Mittie didn’t reply. She sat down beside him, “Mittie,” she cupped his chin in her hand, “tell me honestly, is your marriage undergoing difficulties?”
Mittie jerked his head back and blew a laugh all over the table top. Amanda stood up and looked for reason in the person of Nathan Wolfstein.
But as Wolfstein swayed past us to the door, he just patted Mrs. Thurston on the shoulder. “Amanda,” he said, “your Leila’s a good woman even if, as the young people would say, she do like to ball.”
This remark, from a Pro-fess-or, dropped Amanda back into her seat. She shook her head at each of us in turn. “Well, I never,” she faltered, “I simply don’t know what to think.”
I believe it may have been the only time in her life she had made such an admission.
This public disclosure of marital difficulties took place on the evening of July 3rd, at a time when Floren Park was crowded with holiday tourists. A traveling carnival had set up its rides and booths in the wide dirt field we used as a parking lot. Red, yellow, and blue neon lights sputtered over the field to the whirring buzz of a huge black generator. There was an over-sweet smell of candied apples and spun sugar in the air. Children screamed with happy terror in the spinning rides.
We expected a large audience at the theater that night and again on Independence Day. Joely and I went over there from the boarding house to set up for the evening’s performance of Our American Cousin, which Mittie had chosen in honor of the national holiday. It was the melodrama that had been playing at the Ford Theater the night Lincoln was assassinated, and it was a favorite of Mittie’s, as he was a Civil War enthusiast: in fact, a person of nationalistic impulses, in general, who put a flag out in his yard on American birthdays and commemorative occasions. (To Joely’s radical annoyance, there was one in front of the theater and the summer house now.) So, for this production, Mittie and I had researched the original staging of Our American Cousin and had tried to reproduce them as nearly as possible. He had thrown himself into this project with a silent, relentless energy that a litt
le disturbed me. He was also playing the lead; Leila was not in the show.
Mrs. Thurston had come to the theater with us, and when I finished checking the set, she asked me to drive her back to the house. We borrowed Wolfstein’s car, for the Red Bus was gone. Mittie had disappeared; so had Leila.
Mrs. Thurston had become very concerned about the children, whom Sabby was baby-sitting back at the house, and she talked about them on the way home. It was as though her knowledge that all was not in its proper place with the Starks had immediately been given to Maisie and Davy too, and had altered their perceptions of life’s stability. She also seemed to fear that the unbalanced Spur would do “Leila’s poor babies” some mental or physical damage before she could come to their rescue. To the children, and to Mittie, she assumed a, “I will never desert Mr. Micawber,” attitude. For, as she said, until Leila could be brought to her senses, someone had to stay sane and hold things together.
Meanwhile, her tone toward me was cooler than usual. She was forced to talk to me because she had to talk, and I was the only other person in the car. But she blamed me because she was talking to me. It was also clear that somewhere inside her, she suspected that I was the cause of the entire situation, either directly or ultimately.
“I hope you will now begin to understand, Devin, why parents often have to take actions that may seem harsh to those who do not have to assume the responsibility for a child’s upbringing. And you know that it is the truth that Leila was a good, Christian, and obedient child until you two started going around together defying me.”
Either Mrs. Thurston chose, for rhetorical effect, to bestow on me undeserved credit as the first to lead Leila astray, or the significance of Link Richards, Dickey Brown, and my half-dozen other predecessors had never been brought to her attention. (As a matter of fact, though I had never admitted it to Leila, when I met her she taught me all the carnal knowledge I knew at the time. And such was her expertise, it was as much as I knew for many years afterward.) However, I accepted my crown of primrose leaves from Mrs. Thurston without disclaimer, and she continued.
The Delectable Mountains Page 13
