Mom Doth Murder Sleep

by James Yaffe

  “He is sort of cynical and sarcastic,” I said. “But I don’t think he’d do anything really malicious—”

  “The trouble with your theory,” the old lady said to Dave, “is it isn’t logical.”

  “Since when is revenge ever logical?”

  “That an actor who didn’t get a part should try to ruin the play,” the old lady said, “this I couldn’t argue with. But such a stupid way to do it! If he wants to ruin the play, why does he quit four days before opening? Knowing the director is an actor too, and what’s more, played the same part once and has the lines memorized? Why don’t he wait till the opening night, the curtain is ready to go up, and then he should quit?”

  “All right then,” Dave said, “you don’t think there was anything fishy about Cunningham’s blow-up.”

  “On the other hand—” The old lady stopped and frowned. “There’s something. This much you’re right about, Davie. About this blowing-up is something that isn’t kosher. So what is it, what is it?” She gave her lower lip a tug for a long time, but her frown didn’t go away.

  Finally she looked up at us, smiling again. “Who says you’re going now? You didn’t have a second piece yet of the strawberry tart. Believe me, there’s plenty more in the kitchen.”

  She bustled off through the swinging door, and I noticed Dave watching me.

  I turned my eyes away from him, suddenly feeling a little guilty, though Dave couldn’t possibly have known what was going on in my mind. I was thinking about the old lady’s questions and comments. Pretty sharp questions and comments, I thought. They reminded me of certain things I’d been wondering about lately.…

  3

  Dave’s Narrative

  Personally I’ve never been a big fan of the theatre. A good movie costs one-fifth as much, and the actors never forget their lines.

  Mom is the theatre nut in our family. Ever since she was a young girl and her parents brought her to New York from the old country, she went to as many plays as she could. In the early days, when she didn’t have the money, she waited in line for hours for standing room or cut-rate seats, and she didn’t care how high up she was sitting. The actors could look like little dolls and sound as if they were whispering to her from the next block, she’d still say, “By me it has to be flesh-and-blood people. I can’t get interested in talking photographs.”

  So even if Roger hadn’t been in it, Mom would have gone to Macbeth. She was one of the small band of regular subscribers to the Mesa Grande Art Players, and nothing could keep her away from any of their productions, not even the amateurish acting, the rickety scenery, or the undependable lights.

  So Mom and I got two tickets for the opening night, Thursday, October 3. And then, that morning, she called me at the office. “I can’t go out tonight,” she said. “I’m coughing and sneezing, I’ve got the bug. Didn’t you tell me, when I left New York, that out here, with the fresh air and the mountains, there aren’t any bugs?”

  I never told her anything of the sort, but I let it pass.

  “I’ll skip the play myself,” I said, “and come over and keep you company.”

  “Positively not. One of us has to be there, we shouldn’t disappoint Roger. Mrs. Minetta from next door is coming in to put my dinner on the stove and play a little gin rummy with me afterward.”

  I should have realized that Mom would have a contingent of neighborly souls all ready to rally round in an emergency. She attracts friends the way a dog attracts fleas. Maybe for the same reason: she feeds them. She not only gives them chicken soup for their stomachs, she also listens with a sympathetic ear to their troubles.

  I tried to find somebody to go to the opening night with me, but I didn’t have any luck. The woman I was most interested in at the time, who works as a paralegal for one of the local judges, was committed to baby-sit for her married daughter’s little girl.

  I asked Ann Swenson, my boss, if she’d care to use the extra ticket. Her husband, a surgeon, was often busy at night. But she said she had too much work to do, getting her final arguments ready for the jury in the rape case that was just finishing up. She’d have to see Roger’s performance later in the run. I also offered the ticket to Mabel Gibson, our secretary in the office; she’s a white-haired motherly type, and she treated all of us like her chicks; she certainly intended to do some clucking over Roger the actor. But she told me that Thursday was her husband’s bowling night, and her obligation to keep him company and boost his morale was sacred.

  So I went down to the theatre by myself.

  To tell the truth, I was feeling more than a little self-sacrificial about this. My attitude toward Roger, at this particular time, wasn’t totally positive. I still couldn’t forget the look on his face last Sunday, after Mom came out with her deductions about Lloyd Cunningham. Was he beginning to guess certain things? About the relationship between Mom and me, particularly regarding some of my cases?

  By the time I got to the theatre for the opening night of Macbeth, one thing was absolutely clear to me. In the future I had to make sure that Roger didn’t see nearly as much of Mom as he’d been doing lately.

  * * *

  The performance was scheduled to begin at seven, earlier than usual, because our local drama critic, who also reviewed concerts, lectures, movies, and ice shows, had to make a midnight deadline if his review was going to be in tomorrow morning’s paper. It was beyond me why the Players went to all that trouble for such a reason. That drama critic, moonlighting from his job as a physics professor at Mesa Grande College, always panned their shows anyway.

  The theatre had been built in 1927, tacked on to the back end of the old city auditorium, where wrestling matches, antique fairs, and revivalist preachers still held forth. It was a nice little theatre, actually, with a thick velvet curtain and decent acoustics, and seating for about two hundred people. The architect had given it a name too: the Ramon Novarro Theatre, in honor of the famous silent-movie heartthrob who spent a week in Mesa Grande, visiting his nephew, back in 1925. Traveling repertory companies doing Shakespeare and other classics were supposed to be enticed by this theatre to stop at Mesa Grande on their triumphant national tours. Not too many of them ever did. The stock market crashed and, even more fatally, talking pictures were invented. The Ramon Novarro Theatre sank into limbo for more than half a century. The two hundred seats got old and broken; the stage became a storing place for all the overflow debris of whatever was going on in the auditorium.

  Until four or five years ago, when Lloyd Cunningham discovered the old wreck and persuaded the City Council to put a little money into refurbishing it; not exactly to make it a splendid little jewel but at least to clean it up enough so an audience could be put into it. Since then, the Mesa Grande Art Players paid the city a reasonable rent and used the theatre as their permanent home during their regular season, from October to May.

  The entrance to the theatre didn’t have any long marquee with neon lights. It was one small door, with a sign over it that said “Ramon Novarro Theatre”; under the sign was the great heartthrob’s face, painted on wood in black and white. When you went through this entrance door, you didn’t find yourself in a spacious lobby with gilt-painted box offices. What you got was a narrow corridor with a table at the end of it where some harried volunteer, usually the wife of one of the actors, would be selling tickets right up to curtain time.

  A few people were ahead of me at the ticket table, but it didn’t take me long to get my turn. I told the lady at the table that I had an extra ticket to turn in, and she quickly said, “No refunds.” I told her I didn’t expect any, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

  On the way to my seat, I recognized a lot of people in the audience. That’s the thing about Mesa Grande that always puzzles outsiders. With a population of two hundred thousand people, we go on being a small town in one respect: we still don’t have the blessing of privacy, of anonymity, that a big city can offer. Maybe this is because most of our new population are blue-collar worker
s or second-rank office help who have pushed into the outlying districts to the north and the east that have clustered around jerry-built malls, and half of whom will probably move somewhere else in the next five years. Maybe it’s because of all the military bases that surround us.

  Whatever the reason, the power structure and social makeup of the town are pretty much as narrow and limited as they were twenty years ago. The same names, rich old families who have been here for generations, show up regularly on letterheads and boards of directors; you see the same people at every so-called cultural event; you run into them at Rotary luncheons, school-board meetings, sessions of the City Council, lectures at our local liberal arts college. From this fairly small group come the people who run for office or otherwise get their names in our one and only newspaper. The same clergymen—ministers of the leading Episcopal, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Roman Catholic churches, and occasionally even our only local rabbi—are constantly being quoted on public issues. Just like in any small town, you keep seeing the same faces over and over again, and if you don’t recognize them, they’re sure to recognize you, and often they know more about your personal business than you know yourself.

  So it wasn’t surprising that the audience at the opening of Macbeth should be full of familiar faces. Some of them were the affluent-looking middle-aged types who patronized the symphony, the summer opera, the concerts and lectures at Mesa Grande College. They were local doctors and lawyers, officers of banks, retired military, widows and dowagers of the older families in town. And there weren’t all that many of them; their money and patronage had to be spread awfully thin.

  Mixed in with these were the types that showed up only for theatrical events, a younger, seedier group who worked as clerks in local stores or taught at the local schools. They decorated their small rooms with old movie posters, clinging fiercely to the edges of what passed for artistic life in Mesa Grande. Among this group a higher than normal proportion were gay, or at least the men cultivated the exaggerated gestures and high-pitched voices that they thought belonged to the gay world in bigger, more sophisticated cities.

  The two groups, wealthy patrons and scruffy mavericks, kept pretty much apart, sat in their own sections of the theater, and talked only to others in the same group. They seemed to tolerate each other pretty well, though, maybe because they knew instinctively that they had one thing in common. They were all dedicated to something that practically everybody else in Mesa Grande looked down on with contempt if not downright hostility.

  My seat was in the third row. On the aisle, so that I had to maneuver my way past him, was a neatly dressed man, with a bald head, horn-rimmed glasses, and a mellow suntan. I recognized him from Roger’s description as the famous movie director Allan Franz.

  I turned to him and introduced myself, and told him how pleased my young assistant had been to meet him the other day. I asked him how he was enjoying his stay in Mesa Grande.

  He shrugged and said, “It seems like a nice little town. The only trouble with it is, if I put it in a movie who’d believe it? I keep seeing people on the streets with cowboy hats, they look as if they came from Central Casting. And all the stores that sell nothing but guns for hunting! No offense, but it’s Middle America set up on the main lot.”

  I laughed and said I occasionally had the same feeling.

  “And all this fresh air you’ve got here,” Franz went on. “I’m sure it’s doing no end of damage to my lungs. I always sleep like a top, thank God, even in strange hotel rooms, but I’ll feel safer when I get back to that healthy Los Angeles smog.”

  Then Franz gave me a grin, slightly sardonic but not unfriendly. “So your boy was present at the big bang the other day?” he said. “Now which one was he? Oh yeah, Fleance. Not too bad. Reasonably tolerable, in fact.”

  “He says you didn’t say much to him about his performance.”

  “Why should I have? He seems like a nice kid. Definitely an amateur, but that’s okay. The best Hamlet I ever saw was an amateur. Your boy—what’s his name, Roger?—was saying his lines the way he thought a human being might say them. No fancy business, no highfalutin airs and poses, no Method, for Christ’s sake! What I mean is, he was one of the few people on that stage who wasn’t, God help us, ecting. So what would’ve been the point of telling him so? Then he might’ve got self-conscious and stopped doing it. Or started doing it, if you follow my meaning.”

  “And the rest of them were ‘ecting’?”

  “At the top of their voices. Or with no voices at all, mumbling into their underwear. Depending on who they think they are, Gielgud or Brando.”

  “But Roger says you paid every one of them a compliment.”

  “Sure I did. And then I told every one of them what they were doing that was terrible. The compliment helps the insult go down smoother. Like chocolate milk with a pill. Remember how the doctor used to do that to you when you were a kid? Actors are all little kids.”

  He gave a big sigh. “You want to know the truth? Last Sunday was one of the saddest afternoons I ever spent in my life. Actors are depressing enough under ordinary circumstances. The lives they lead, the shit they take from everybody! And where does it get them? Ninety per cent of them are out of work ninety per cent of the time, and even the ones that manage to make a living at it for a while mostly end up dead broke, living off charity in old actors’ homes.

  “The point I’m making is, real actors are sad enough, but would-be actors, for Christ’s sake! Like the ones we’re about to see in this play. They put on all the mannerisms, all the stupid poses you get from professionals. They call each other ‘darling,’ they show you what somebody once told them was their ‘good’ profile, they even snort-coke from time to time, though they sure as hell can’t afford it. But it all comes out wrong, you know what I mean? Like a rotten performance. If ‘players’ are walking shadows, which is what old Shakespeare calls them at the end of the ordeal we’re facing tonight, the players in this town must be the shadows of shadows.

  “And you know what’s the craziest part of it? These people all have decent jobs. They’re hardware salesmen, insurance agents, teachers. And they’re eating their hearts out because they can’t run off to the West Coast or the East Coast, and descend into hell!”

  “But if this is what makes their real lives bearable to them—”

  “Excuse the expression, Dave, that’s a lot of horse manure. Nobody would say something like that about any other profession or business in this world. You’re a policeman, right? If you had somebody working for you who was rotten at the job, who couldn’t do anything right, you’d fire him, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t choke up and tell him it’s okay for him to be a dumb incompetent cop if this is what makes life bearable to him.”

  Franz broke off with a shake of his head. Then he grinned and started in again. “You know what most of the actors I know would say, if they heard me talking to you like this? Typical director’s crap! He couldn’t make it as an actor himself, so now he goes around bad-mouthing the profession. All directors are frustrated actors, that’s received wisdom where I come from.”

  “Does it apply to you?”

  His grin broadened. He didn’t seem to be the least bit offended. “Sure it does. I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid. That was in Brooklyn. My father owned a hardware store. Did I ever help him take care of it? No, I pounded the pavements around Times Square for three years, waiting on tables to keep alive, giving up jobs so I could go to casting calls where imbeciles looked me over like I was raw meat, blew cigar smoke in my face, and told me I didn’t amount to shit. Until I got smart, and decided I’d be one of the imbeciles and blow cigar smoke in other people’s faces. Of course, if I’d known what I know now—”

  “Being a director has its problems too?”

  “You can say that again. A director—especially a movie director—has to develop the ability to live with fear and uncertainty. You’re in charge of a gigantic business enterprise, you’ve got hundreds of e
mployees, millions of dollars riding on you—and all the time, in your heart, you don’t know how the hell anything is going to turn out.”

  “Surely you work from a script?”

  “Scripts don’t mean a thing. Believe me. The script gives you a general outline, but the details along the way keep changing. Every day it’s a new emergency, an unexpected obstacle. So you have to improvise, roll with the punches, take crazy chances. Come to think of it, if you’re going to survive in this business, you have to enjoy fear and uncertainty, you have to get your kicks out of them.”

  “Roger tells me that your daughter wants to be an actress?”

  “Your boy tells you that, does he? I had my eye on him during that rehearsal last Sunday. The way he was looking at Laurie—I guess I know good old-fashioned lust when I see it. Young people haven’t changed much in that respect since our day.”

  “I guess they haven’t. You don’t hold it against him?”

  “Far from it. Laurie brings out the lust in plenty of young men; she’d worry me if she didn’t.” He laughed, then grew more serious. “You ought to warn your young assistant, though, he might be heading for a bad pain in the heart. Laurie’s not interested in any long-term relationships just now. She’s very serious about this acting business. When she gets out of college in a couple of years, she plans to go to one of those big acting schools back east. Yale or Carnegie Mellon, one of those places.”

  “She must have a lot of talent,” I said.

  “She’s pretty damn good, if I say so myself. And her looks are on her side too. She’s a tall redhead, that’s always surefire. Takes after her mother, thank God.”

  “You’re not worried about her becoming an actress? Everything you were saying just now, about what a competitive profession it is—”