After we handed the relic around, Sabby passed it reluctantly back to Leila, who returned it, saying, “Why don’t you keep it, Sabby?” Sabby pressed the card like an orchid in her copy of Bonjour Tristesse.
Uninterested, his head slumped toward his cup, Wolfstein breathed in coffee fumes like ether. “Nate,” Leila said, “I want to call a meeting. We’ll all eat over at the boarding house. Can you be there at six?”
Space and time were of no consequence to Wolfstein. The internal wait was all. He said he would be there. He didn’t much look to me like he’d be eager to direct another play.
I saw him that afternoon out in the rear of the theater, huddled, despite the heat, in a costume shawl talking to Sabby Norah. Over the past month, they had found themselves in a kind of friendship, she nursing him with her awkward but unflagging solicitude, he sharing with her the memories of a life in the theater, that golden, magical world of which she was an adoring acolyte. I would see them often together now on the wicker porch chairs in the early evening or in his room bent over a scrapbook of memorabilia, Sabby’s pale, plain face flushed into beauty with wonder at his tales of triumphs, mishaps, intrigues, glory. He talked of everything but those years in Hollywood. About that, he kept silence. But the stage! He had known Them, or known those who knew Them, or at least had seen Them perform. Helen Hayes. Lunt and Fontanne. Cornell. Olivier. The Barrymores.
“Finally the prompter just yelled the line out, for the third time: ‘I LOVE YOU!’ And Coward—you know that look he gives.” Sabby nodded eagerly, as if Noel Coward were an intimate friend. “He looked right down at the prompt box and said, ‘My good man, we know the line, but who says it?’” Sabby shivered with giggles, and Wolfstein’s thin, tired voice went on, “The worst instance of scene stealing I ever saw? Let me see…”
Encouraged by her Boswellian enthrallment, he offered up, in place of a future, or even a present, the cynosure of his past. Eventually, telling the stories began to absorb him too, as if by a long review, some specific meaning, summation, one he did not know yet, would ultimately evolve. More of us began to sit beside Sabby, for she was generous with her Johnson. So we too could listen to a life that, unlike our own, had already been so fully shaped, so cut to a pattern that was now pinned, experience by experience, to the inalterable past. And after we cleaned the theater aisles of what scant debris our small audience had left the night before, Pete and I brought coffee over to hear about how General MacArthur had dropped in on a musical review Wolfstein and his pals put on for their squadron in the Philippines. That the gray, palsied Wolfstein had fought in a war astonished us. And in a war we’d been taught to think of as a good one, as opposed to the bad one in Vietnam we were trying hard to avoid. To think of Wolfstein grinning into the sun under palm trees, tanned and healthy, able to squeeze a trigger with those shaking fingers that now couldn’t hold a glass steady, was impossible. The young Nate Wolfstein was a completely separate person to me, and as I envisioned him card-playing in a crowded barracks, I wondered whether, in fact, Leila’s instinct had been right and Calhoun Grange really was Nate’s son. And maybe Nate had known it, too, but had just let it drop when he saw Grange could not care if it were true or not.
At 5:30, Joely and I started over to Mrs. Booter’s together. I was talking to him about Wolfstein when he suddenly grabbed my arm. “Hey, look who’s back!”
Right in front of the new Nixon campaign headquarters on Main Street, that was next to Hade’s Buick that was next to Western Outfits, Spurgeon Debson was peddling his wares. Wearing his Vietcong flag tank-top, he sat cross-legged upon a carpet like a Turkish merchant. And scrawled on, as it turned out, the backs of our play posters, and leaned against the sidewalk curb were his advertisements, his sales pitch: “The Whole World Eats Shit.” “You Don’t Have to Take Their Shit.” “Shit on the Shit-Eaters.” “SHIT POWER.”
In the past few days, Spur had obviously been diligent in whatever workshop Leila must have provided him. There was a lot of merchandise. There were SHIT POWER buttons, T-shirts, both stamped with a ring of dung. There were American flags, each with a slab of plastic poop, the sort you can get in party joke kits, glued right in the middle of its stripes. There were clear plastic toy rockets, packed in six- and twelve-inch increments of guaranteed 100 percent human product excrement. There were rope coils of rubber feces that looked like Indian dancing snakes.
From the window of the Nixon headquarters, two fresh-scrubbed teenage girls in straw campaign hats gaped and giggled at this display, ducking beneath the ledge whenever Spur wheeled to catch them peekabooing.
Apparently, the Muse nonremunerative, Spur had turned to telling by selling; he would save the American people in the American way, by building a better mousetrap and catching them in it. Spur had become a small businessman. Not that he was doing any business that we could see. The Nixonettes were only window shopping. Their mad money was not for this variety of madness. Around Spur, tourists passed down the sidewalk like painted people on a slow-moving backdrop. Their faces pursed, or pruned, or gawked, or looked politely away as if they had stumbled inadvertently into the wrong bathroom and were pretending to be elsewhere. Two of the Mexican flower ladies hurried by. Recognizing their old fellow vendor, they sidestepped him and scurried like hens to a safe intersection.
“Looks like Spur’s overriding the sheriff’s edict against street peddling,” Joely noted, “but just wait until Booter gets a sniff of what’s being peddled.” He called to the merchant, “What’s going on, Spur?”
Unpressed by customers, Spur was willing to talk to us. Nothing was going on. The truth was going down. He, the truth-teller, was going down on America, ass first. From now on, he would reason with his rectum. Once he had put his faith in the power of language—but language had failed him. The word was dead. Dead and rotten. Dead and rotten and slimy with dead, rotten maggots of no meaning. The written word was invisible: the spoken word was inaudible. The paragraph was the cocksucking queen doxy stooge of the military industrial complex, and every time we opened our mouths to let language out, we played right into Their hairy hands. All his products were alternatives to language, a kind of conceptual art in which the texts (the plastic) were accompanied by the artist’s commentary (the excrement). Thus, the rockets were books of political poetry; the verse had come from his bowels.
“This whorehouse of a world,” he summed up sometime later, “was built out of Those Bastards’ words. Built up and up and up with all their bawdy house bricks of filthy, lying nouns and verbs. See Dick run. See Dick run for president. See Dick run and catch his fat ass on a rocket nose and shoot his wad in an astronaut’s eye right on the ass-licking BUTTON OF THE NAZI COUNTDOWN…” Spur had turned toward the window and was yelling with rabid gestures at the two Nixon girls inside stuffing envelopes with promises. One of them reached for her phone.
“I saw that!” Spur let her know. “She’s trying to get me busted. I don’t have time for that shit.” We suggested, in that case, that he move his own off the street. He said that he was waiting there for his dog, and so I told him that Booter was after his dog too, news that Spur found both “rich” and “perfect.”
Out of motives he never explained, Joely actually bought one of the laminated flags. For four dollars! The rockets were even more expensive. As we were leaving, two flower children stopped. “What’s SHIT stand for?” one asked.
“SHIT doesn’t stand for. SHIT is!” Spur explained.
The guy bought a button. “Love, brother,” he said in parting.
“Love’s a word,” Spur told him. “Turds are better than words.”
• • •
After dinner at Mrs. Booter’s, Leila brought up All My Sons again. When she finished, she turned to Wolfstein. “Nate, what do you think? We can’t do it without you.”
Nate wasn’t sure. Neither was Joely. “For God’s sake, why do you want to take on something else, Leila?”
>
She sat at the head table, where Mittie used to preside over our meetings, vacillating between dictatorial brusqueness one day and apologetic abnegation the next. Her skin was still as pale as her hair, as if she had been too busy to notice that summer might have tanned it. Her eyes, I realized, were shadowed with fatigue. “You’re supposed to try. Maybe most of the time you don’t know what you’re doing, and maybe you don’t do it very well. But the purpose is, the point is, we’re supposed to be out here trying…” I thought maybe she was going to cry again. “And instead…and instead we’re just dying.”
“Leila, honey, are you okay? Why, darling, it’s all going to work out,” her mother promised.
No one else felt like saying anything. And in that silence, Mrs. Booter entered the dining room wearing her black widow dress.
Her face was long and thin like her brother-in-law’s, but instead of the sheriff’s jovial brutishness, Mrs. Booter kept her features carefully pinched in a parsimonious way, edging her words out like pennies from a snap-purse. “Mrs. Stark,” she snipped off, “may I see you for a minute? In my parlor?” Her parlor was that musty relic room where memories of her escaped husband were still held prisoner.
“All right,” Leila agreed, and followed the widow out, leaving us to deal however we wished with all she had said.
“I feel like a creep,” Seymour began.
“Well, it hasn’t exactly been the sort of summer we were promised,” Suzanne told Dennis Reed, whom she’d invited to have dinner with us.
“That’s not Leila’s fault,” Joely said.
Guilt and recriminations snuck around the room.
Then Sabby got up. “Leila’s right. And I think, well, I think we all could have helped her a lot more than we have. She didn’t say so, but I think she wants to do this play for Mittie; he used to talk about putting it on someday. And now Mittie’s gone, and here she is, left with everything, and Mr. Stark treating her so awfully. Well, it’s not for me to say, but I think we ought to do it for her. Mr. Wolfstein, I just know you could do a beautiful job, if…you know, if, of course, you feel like it wouldn’t be too much of a strain. You could give us something to…something we really could achieve together. And…well, it’s just my opinion.” Sabby sat down as abruptly as she had risen. It was her first speech at a company meeting, and I think she had just realized what she was doing; she hadn’t even been sniffling.
“All My Sons. Okay. What’s it about, Joely?” Seymour asked.
“There’s this guy, Joe Keller. A military contractor who made engines for bomber planes in World War II. Around 1955, he’s living with his wife and his son, Chris, in good old suburbia. His other son, Tom, was a pilot killed in the war.”
“But,” Sabby interrupted, “his wife refuses to believe her son was killed. Even after all these years, she still thinks he’s coming back,”
“That’s right,” Joely went on. “Chris runs the factory now. He’s gotten rich, but he’s still sort of an idealist. And he loves his father, even though the old man is a real yahoo.”
“Okay, what’s a yahoo?” Ronny asked,
“A capitalist,” Marlin told him.
“You see, his father’s been in jail. He sold defective engine blocks, and as a result, about a hundred G.I.s died when their planes crashed. Of course, Keller said he didn’t know they were defective, that his partner sold them without his knowledge. It’s a lie, but he gets off, and his poor partner’s still in jail after fifteen years. But Chris believes him, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to keep working there.”
“How many parts?” Ronny asked. “And will the audience get it?”
“The Belle of Black Bottom Gulch was too complicated for you,” Marlin told him.
“Look, Ronny,” Sabby said, “the partner’s daughter was engaged to Tom, the one that got killed. Now, all these years later, she and the other son, she and Chris, have fallen in love. You could play Chris.”
“The main thing is,” Joely finished, “the old man did know, and he sold those engines for the money. And that’s why his wife can’t let herself believe Tom is dead. Because if he is, then Keller killed him—his son was flying one of those planes with a cracked engine block. So he had murdered, you see, one of his own sons and put the blame off on his partner. When Chris finds out, his whole life is shattered, he’s in love with the daughter of the man his father framed, and his own success is built on the blood money his father made in the war.”
“Typical,” Marlin snapped.
“Well, then the father—who’s spent the whole play blustering and lying and whining, making excuses, and trying to rationalize away the immorality of what he did before (that’s what business is like anyway, and you have to take a chance, and he did it for his family, and it wasn’t his fault, and so on)—finally he realizes what he’s done. He finally sees that they’re all—all the boys who died in the war—they’re all his sons.”
“And he commits suicide,” Wolfstein said, coughing into his handkerchief. Sabby brought him a glass of water.
“Yeah, okay, I say let’s do it,” Seymour said.
“I think we ought to change it from World War II to Vietnam,” I suggested. “It’s the same damn thing all over again.”
“Fat chance the chairman of Dow Chemical feeling guilty enough to blow his head off,” Marlin sneered. “Does the son tell the old man off?”
Wolfstein nodded.
“Then give me the part.”
“And, oh, Mr. Wolfstein,” Sabby beamed, “you could direct and play the father.”
“Ah, Sabby,” he murmured through cigarette smoke. “You are so young.” Her face fell under this accusation until he added, “No, no, my dear. I envy you, your ability to believe. Well, then, why not, eh, Amanda, when you come to think of it, why not? While huddling in our elderly corner of the madhouse, why not put on a play for your daughter?”
“Now, Nathan, you have a gloomy attitude on life, as my sister did. I don’t see why we have to allow the fact that we have been surrounded by more insanity than some people might think was their fair share, get us so run down in the mouth. Why, yes, I think we should do that play. Everyone seems to think it’s a good one, and as you know”—we certainly did—“I have always believed in keeping busy. There is nothing that will depress a person sooner than sloth.”
So we were agreed, and only waited to tell Leila. She was gone a long time. When she did return, she had her own announcement. And she was no longer pale, but flushed down her neck and shoulders. “Mrs. Booter,” she said loudly and clearly, “has just advised me that we are no longer welcome at her establishment.”
The old waiter grinned with smug delight from the corner where he always watched us eat. “You are dismissed,” Mrs. Thurston informed him. His grin spread wider, like a gargoyle’s. “Insolence!” she named him, but he stayed where he was.
“For meals?” asked Joely.
“No,” Leila said, “we have to vacate the rooms too. She doesn’t like what she’s heard about us from her brother.”
“That pig!” Marlin reminded us.
“She says she believes in decency.”
“Why, I certainly hope this lady isn’t trying to imply that other people do not believe in decency! Leila, honey, I hope you gave her a piece of your mind.”
Joely was pulling on his flames of hair. “We’ve already paid ’til the end of the month. Double rates too! Plus we’re still paying board for Jennifer and Ashton. And they’re GONE.”
“Thank God,” threw in Ronny.
“And she didn’t think there was anything indecent about that? Well, shit, why don’t we just stay? Let her take us to court if she wants to!”
“No, I don’t think so,” Leila picked at her cold food. “I said we’d be out by the end of the week. We can make do at my place and at the theater. It’s okay.”
“But why? Wh
y let her win?” He began polishing his glasses ferociously. “Hypocritical old bag.”
“Oh, Joely, come on.” Leila put her fork down tiredly. “It’s just not worth it. Really. She’ll refund the money.”
Sabby came over to her with some coffee and sniffled, “Leila, everybody wants to do the play.” Mrs. Thurston offered Sabby the handkerchief she kept up her sleeve.
Chapter 24
Good and Bad Angels
“Naw, Leila wouldn’t just give in. I bet that bitch threatened her, said she was going to bring up all sorts of juicy tidbits about the others.” Joely was grumbling in his bed that night. “Drugs, sodomy, knocked-up girls. Bet that place was a voyeuristic paradise for a prurient old bag like Mrs. Booter.”
I hadn’t been sleeping either. “You like Leila a lot, don’t you, Joely?”
“Yeah. A lot more than most.”
It was quiet except for the whirring of bugs against the window screen. Then Joely’s voice came out at me from the darkness again. “Leila got Margery a doctor. They’re going tomorrow. I don’t know how she got Ferrell to give her the name of an abortionist.”
“I thought they were going to get married.”
“They didn’t want to get married.”
“Oh.”
“It must have been rough for Leila, the way she feels about all that. And God knows how Margery must be feeling. And Marlin. Aaahhhhh, boy.” I heard him turn over to beat a hollow into his pillow. I lay there. How would I feel in Marlin’s place, how did Marlin feel? Time and a thousand past failures dragged through my mind. My crotch itched. My back hurt. I knew I had only so long to escape by sleep before need forced me on my feet and up to the john.
Ten minutes later, I was feeling my way along the walls upstairs. There was a light under Leila’s door, and when I came back from the bathroom, she looked out.
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