“Is that true?”
She gave me a look, sorrowful and suffering as a Puritan in Drury Lane and went backstage to show Sabby how to hem up a costume properly.
Mrs. Thurston’s news made me happy, and I couldn’t figure out why. Somehow I felt like a decision had been made about me, though, of course, it had nothing to do with me at all.
I thought about it, looking at the painting of Leila faded on the floor, and the portraits of our company lining the lobby wall. Jennifer and Ashton, who were gone. And Mittie. And the Buddy Smith from Omaha who had never come because he’d gone to Vietnam.
The door opened and Marlin and Margery stood there.
“Hi, Devin, how’s it going?”
“Fine. How ’bout you?” What could I say? How was the abortion?
“You two look tired. Want a Coke?” Somehow, they looked older too.
“Well, Devin,” Marlin told me as he handed Margery her Coke, “Old Uncle Sam gave me the finger. You can bless that busted ear and knee and psyche of yours.”
“Oh, shit. That letter from your draft board. We were worried about that.”
“Yeah. Joely gave it to me. Can’t say it was much of a surprise. Low grades in a low-grade school.”
“I’m really sorry, Marlin. What are you going to do?”
The door opened again, and Leila hurried in. “Sabby said…” She stopped, and with her face intent with question, stared at Margery. Margery smiled, then grinned, then shook her head and ran over and hugged Leila. “I couldn’t do it,” she said. “We couldn’t. We got all the way there, and then we couldn’t. We didn’t want to.”
“Oh, Margery…I’m glad.”
“So give me a cigar,” Marlin said to me. “I’m going to have a baby. Then give me another cigar. I’m going to get married.”
“Well, congratulations,” I said. “Wait’ll Joely hears.”
“A Canadian baby,” he added.
“We’re leaving,” Margery explained.
“Oh, Margery, are you sure?” Leila took her hands.
“Yes, we’ve thought about it a lot. What if Marlin went over there and got killed? I’m sure. This is what I want to do.” She smiled again. “Do you think I’m going to risk their dropping a bomb on an expectant father?”
Decisions—that’s what made them look older.
Chapter 25
Absence
Because the leads were theirs, we gave a final performance of The Belle of Black Bottom Gulch the next night, and for the last time, Margery was the Belle and Marlin was the Hero who saved her from being robbed, seduced, foreclosed upon, abandoned, nearly raped, practically frozen, and almost bifurcated by a cardboard buzz-saw, just as it had happened when I had looked in from the lobby that first night in Floren Park. Twenty-six people came.
“Seems like all we’ve ever done this summer is say good-bye,” Sabby sighed.
I poured her another glass of wine from one of Leila’s halfgallons. It was midnight, and everyone sat in the Belle’s lowly cabin on the stage to say good-bye to Marlin and Margery, to offer our commiserations at their exile, our best wishes for their nuptials, our blessings on their baby. Everyone thought they were very brave to give up their country, though no one thought much of the country they were giving up. Everyone was scared for them, and they were scared for themselves, but no one knew what else they could, or should, do. It was an insane choice to have to make, and if you had told us at the prom, or midterms, or sit-ins that we would have to make it, it wouldn’t have made sense.
“It shouldn’t be happening,” Leila said. But it was.
Seymour counted the profits. “Sixty-five dollars tonight. Best in a while.”
Leila gave the money to Marlin and Margery. “It’s your play,” she said.
Then Verl walked in on us out of the darkness.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” Leila said.
“So have I. Verl, where have you been?”
“Been in a little trouble,” he said. Verl had been arrested at a demonstration of draft-card burning. Leila moaned when he told us.
“Verl!” I yelled at him. “Why did you burn your stupid draft card? You’re a C.O.! You’re one of the few bona fide C.O.s around! He’s a Quaker,” I went on yelling at everybody else. “He’s always been a Quaker. His father’s a Quaker. His grandfather!”
He stretched his long legs up onto a box on the stage. “Devin’s giving me sort of a dramatic entrance here, isn’t he? How’s everybody doing? How’s Mr. Wolfstein? Any more wine, Leila?”
“Verl—all those articles you’ve been writing for that paper, I bet they’ve got you on some sort of list. They’re going to rake your ass over the coals,” I told him.
“Maybe not. A couple of us went in on a good lawyer.” Then he told us his court date wasn’t coming up for months, and in the meantime, he was going out to Resurrection City in Washington.
“The Poor People’s march?” Joely scoffed. “What for? You missed it. That movement was over when they shot King. What did Resurrection City manage to accomplish except to give each other the runs and sit in the rain listening to old fogies like Reverend Abernathy try to steer his mules right down the middle of every issue. You think the government’s going to listen to them? The place to go is Chicago. The Democratic Convention. That’s where I’m going as soon as we finish up here.”
This was the first any of us had heard about it. Next thing we knew, Sabby Norah would be telling us she’d decided to run guns for the Weathermen.
“You think the Democrats are going to listen to you?” Marlin asked. “Yippies and hippies and skippies and potheads?”
“They’re going to have to listen,” Joely replied solemnly.
“Play the piano, Pete. This is a wedding party,” Leila said. Pete played, “Here Comes the Bride,” and Sabby cried.
Outside, the sky was strewn with stars that gleamed outlines of the mountains. Now the long heat wave was over, and the night was cold. Verl and I sat down by the creek’s edge to talk about how he’d been, how I’d been, why he’d let himself get arrested, why I’d thought I’d never get over Jardin. My concerns seemed silly to me now beside his, or Margery’s, or Marlin’s, or Joely’s, or Leila’s, or just about anyone’s.
“Now, now,” he chuckled. “Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself for being shallow.”
“Boy,” I laughed. “You just never let up, do you? Well, just wait ’til you make a mistake!”
“Make them all the time. Like Dennis Reed. Misjudged him. Thought he was one of the good shallow people. Like you. He’s a total sleaze.”
“Thanks. I guess.”
He leaned on my shoulder and stood up. “But some people, now, I’m right about, right from the start.” He slapped my arm. “Take it easy, hear?”
I watched him whistle off to his old battered Triumph.
Back in the theater, Seymour stood beside Pete’s piano and in his clear, high voice sang “Taps.” On the stage, everyone sat in a circle, their arms crossed, holding hands. “Day is done, gone the sun.” Holding hands, just like in some kids’ camp before all the lights go out.
Chapter 26
The Wanderer
“Yow! YOW! YOW! Cool it, lady, cool it! HEY! WATCH OUT! YOU CAN’T DO THAT!!” It was Spurgeon’s voice.
“GET OUT OF HERE THIS MINUTE. March yourself off this property before I lose my mind. This is an outrage! AN OUTRAGE!” That was Mrs. Thurston.
Joely and Pete and I leapt from our beds and raced outside.
“HEY, YOU CAN’T DO THAT! That’s private property! That’s ART, you Philistine bitch!”
In the backyard, Mrs. Thurston’s quilt-robed rear end protruded from the door of Leila’s little trailer, and Spur’s rockets, flags, coils, and buttons flew out around her while, from behind, Spur jerked at her legs. Maisie and Davy, wi
th their underpants around their ankles, stood by peacefully watching. When Spur finally pried Mrs. Thurston out of the door, her face was wild with anger, she had my fishing rod in her hand, and with it she began at the same time lashing Spur’s artworks and Spur’s legs, face, and arms. Like Samson with his ass-bone, she laid into her foe, beating those rockets and coils as if they were swarming snakes.
“YOW! YOW! YOW!” Spur jumped. “You’re crazy! You’re NUTS, LADY! You’re going to get yourself SUED, destroying private property!”
“SUED! HA!” Mrs. Thurston’s eyes roared flames, and her arm never faltered. She drove Spur leaping before her, slashing with the rod at his calves, all the way down the drive and out onto the open road. Righteous fury gives one the psychic edge (as Spur himself should surely have known), and this time Amanda waxed full of it, not to be withstood. The rest of us just gaped.
Jerking up the children’s underwear, she marched them furiously into the house. They bawled in confusion as they went, while from the other side of the street Spur yelled, “This house is an asylum! Moronic cretinous nest of vipers! Spider cunts! Read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest! BIG NURSE! Castrators! Motherfuckingassholemumumumum,” he mumbled to a halt, and we went back inside.
Mrs. Thurston was fluttering her hand over her heart as she tried to keep herself from hyperventilating. So beside herself was she that she hadn’t realized her lacquered wig was halfway around her head so that it looked like her French twist grew out over her right ear.
“Have a glass of water,” I told her.
She took three slow breaths. “Thank you, Devin, if you would be so kind.” We could hear Maisie and Davy crying on the front porch. Mrs. Thurston sipped her water. “You boys,” she said, “will have to pardon my behavior just now.”
“No, no, it’s nothing,” we assured her.
“I have always been a rational person, believed very highly in rationality”—we all nodded vigorously—“but there comes a time when even a stone would rise up and speak its mind against Spurgeon Debson.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I thought I had seen the worst that man could do. When I heard that he had bitten and relieved himself upon the county sheriff, I thought I had seen the worst. But that was before this four-year-old child informed me that she could not do her potty in the bathroom because, ‘Grandma, Davy and I save our’”—she wrenched up her face and spelled out the word like a sentence of death—“‘our S-H-I-T for Spur. We work for S-H-I-T power.’”
“I wondered if it was real,” Joely said. “I couldn’t see how he could be doing it all himself if it was. I thought maybe it was dogs.”
“Well, I had not been informed that this…vileness was going on in our backyard. To tell you the truth, I hoped the Good Lord in his mercy had at last spared us the acquaintanceship of Mr. Debson altogether. I don’t know why I bothered to delude myself. Of course he was hiding out there! Out there all the time, where else would he be? Or any of the other riffraff she drags in.”
Was she talking about us?
“But I did not know he was manufacturing manure until I caught sight of those two little children doing their potty in two of my cooking pans, and then with their own hands scooping it up and packing it into those contraptions. That he was using those innocent babies in that obscene way. That knowledge I did not have. And, I will tell you, Joely, when I saw that going on, I simply saw flashing stars and screamed as loud as a chicken with its head cut off.”
Out the kitchen window, I could see that Spur had sneaked back to the trailer, where he was collecting his property as fast as he could, with furtive glances over his shoulder to be sure Mrs. Thurston didn’t fly out with the rod again.
Leila, who’d left at seven to drive Margery and Marlin to the bus, pulled up just as Spur finished his packing. We all went out on the front porch to hear what they had to say to each other. “Spur,” she began, “I’d like you to apologize to Booter. If you do, he’ll let those three flower women—”
But, though she had fed and housed him, Spur was not receptive. “Forget it, chick. I am splitting this rabbit-hole-cornball-slime-slop town. Today! I’m moving to Chicago!” Spur pushed past her.
“Damn,” Joely mumbled. “Maybe I won’t go, then.”
“You can’t leave,” she reminded Spur. “You have to show up for court.”
“Taken care of. You think I let these boondock pigs hassle me?”
“Taken care of how?”
“I got friends with bread, baby. This is AMERICA. They’d let you bugger their grandmother if you had enough bread to stuff in their ears so they couldn’t hear her screaming. That’s how.” He walked to the middle of the yard, where he could address the crowd: “STAND THERE! Don’t think you’ve driven me off!”
“We daren’t hope,” threw in Mrs. Thurston.
“Wow, man, I got places to go. This is it! And you plastic Philistine middle-class reactionary college DUMMY-TITS are going to be stuffed up to your honkie necks in MY shit! This house is coming down! And ALL the houses are coming down and all the factories and all the banks and all the universities and EVERYWHERE all you napalm-farters go to hide!”
This speech had nothing particularly to do with us; Spur would have said the same to a gathering of Ubangis. Nevertheless, Mrs. Thurston replied, “Young man, the Good Lord has the patience of Job, but I swear if I don’t believe that you are just about to wear Him out!”
“The Good Lord can take THAT up His asshole!” Spur dropped his two valises and gave God the finger with both hands, cork-screwing his wrists, raising his arms higher and higher, as high as he could reach on his tiptoes.
Davy was peeking out from behind Joely’s legs. “Wave good-bye to a poor one-armed son-of-a-bitch,” Joely told the toddler.
“Can I have his dog?” Maisie asked.
“The sheriff got his dog. That was before he was rich enough to buy off the cops,” Joely explained to her.
• • •
And through it all, we kept working on All My Sons, everyone trying for once as hard as they could to do, for Wolfstein, or Leila, or themselves, the best that they could. Everyone, that is, except Suzanne Steinitz, who was angry because Wolfstein and Leila had given Sabby the role of the fiancée, the ingenue lead. And the only other female part left was a small one—a frowsily sexual, affable housewife who lived with her husband next door to the main characters. (I was her husband; at this point, everyone had to act—some taking double parts; Sabby would also be a child’s voice offstage.) Sabby hadn’t wanted the big role: it was too important, she said; the girl was supposed to be pretty; she wasn’t good enough; she’d ruin the play for everyone else; she’d do the little part.
“Sabby, I’m going to tell you something I’ve been thinking for a long time,” said Wolfstein gently as he sat down, swaddled in a droopy sweater and a scarf on the stage steps beside her. Sabby, who was sure he was about to advise her to stay away from the theater altogether because she was making a fool of herself, began to poke the stems of her glasses through her knit skirt. “You know why I want you to do that part?” She shook her head mournfully. “It’s precisely because you can do those little parts when they’re given to you. And do them right. I’ve been watching you all summer, Sabby, and you want to know something? You’re very good.”
She jerked her head up as if waiting for the punch line.
“I’ve been watching you pretty carefully. Yes, that’s right, even through my fog.” He waited to stop coughing. “And you’ve got it. Not just the love of it. But the gift. Oh, clumsy still, and uncertain, and cluttered with banality, but it peeks through—almost in spite of yourself. In Hedda Gabler. In Cat. The scenes with Cal…yes, it’s there. And besotted waste that I am, I still know it when I see it.”
As if he had told her she might fly if she wished to, Sabby stared at Wolfstein without daring to believe him. And though I do
ubt it had ever crossed our minds before that Sabby was especially good at anything, I think the rest of us saw then that it was true, recalled how, when we used to talk about the performances, we’d use everyone else’s real name—“Marlin was off” or “Ashton overplayed it”—but with her, we always used the character’s name. That’s how well Sabby hid behind the masks.
Well, that speech did it for Suzanne. She wanted her tuition back. This summer was certainly not what she had been led to expect when she applied. It was certainly not what she would call a professional training company run by reputable people. She had thrown away an entire summer being surrounded by talentless provincials, unsophisticated, uncivilized, unsanitary barbarians. The owner was dead, his wife was insane, his director was a stupid has-been alcoholic, and the rest of us were pimply, puerile, and boring, boring, boring; and she burst into tears. Leila gave her her money back.
Joely told Suzanne that her speech was the best performance she’d given all summer, and when Dennis Reed didn’t show up to take her away as she’d said he would, Leila drove her to the airport.
Rehearsals went on. Wolfstein was playing the blustering father with energy remarkable in someone as ill as he was. Somehow he even made himself look healthy, bulky, and coarse. And the rest of us struggled to keep up with him while he nagged, yelled, coaxed, and trained us into “something that coheres, for once!” “Ladies and gentlemen, this time, let’s try to do it right.” “Again, please.” “Again.”
We still hadn’t figured out what to do about Suzanne’s part. Mrs. Thurston was reading the lines, but she was needed to stay with the children and wasn’t exactly what the part called for anyhow. She still sounded like Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Joely had canceled his plans to get to Chicago in time for the presidential convention. He figured he ought to stay and see Leila through the play. “I was here for the first one,” he said. “I ain’t missing the final line.”
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