“She spared both of us a lot of anguish, going the way she did, I guess.”
“Hey, you guys, look what I found!” Still swathed in the pink feather boa, Izzy entered the dining gallery, precariously carrying Gram’s jewelry box.
“Ooh, careful!” I said, as it practically slipped out of her grasp onto the already cluttered table. I swiftly moved a Chinese ginger jar out of harm’s way.
Dorian looked at the porcelain jar. “I’ve never seen that before. Has that always been here?”
I shook my head. “It’s her.”
He slid his chair away from the table. “Oh, my God.”
“Wow,” Izzy breathed. “I sort of want to look. Can I?” she asked tentatively.
“I guess so.”
“Have you looked inside yet?”
“I was too freaked out. I just brought the ginger jar to the people who…you know…and they gave it back to me, and I brought it home and put it on the dining table for the time being.”
“Do you think she’s watching us?” Dorian asked. “I mean, in a manner of speaking.”
I looked at the jar. “I suppose it’s a matter of what you believe. I choose to believe the answer to your question is yes.”
Dorian cleared away a spot on the table, since I feared that if I held the sealed jar while trying to open it, everything would fly out all over the place. I did not want to contemplate the prospect of sweeping Gram into a dustpan. As I carefully opened the jar, Izzy leaned in for a closer look while Dorian backed away and covered his eyes. “You two are really quiet,” he said a moment or two later. “So what’s it look like?”
“See for yourself,” Izzy challenged, but he refused.
“Not what I expected,” I answered quietly.
“Which was?” Izzy asked, looking at me.
“Ash. Ashes. I mean, I guess I expected it…them…her…to sort of resemble my uncle’s law partner’s cigar ashes. Thick and grayish.” I peered further into the ginger jar. “It looks more like pale little pellets, Dorian, if you’re still vicariously interested.” I looked up from the contents into Izzy’s face. “This was a life,” I said contemplatively. “Rich, vibrant, colorful, unique. And look at this,” I added, referring to the ashes themselves. What could be more generic and less colorful?” She gave me a baleful look and I put the lid back on the jar. “What are you holding?” I asked her.
Izzy opened her fist and dumped a couple of loose pieces of jewelry onto the table. “These were out of the box, just sitting on her dresser. I don’t know what you want to do with them.”
I picked up a small ring: gold vermeil studded with tiny seed pearls. “This was her surrogate engagement ring,” I said, examining it.
“What happened to the real one? Didn’t she ever have a diamond?”
“She did, Dorian, but she sold it. Decades ago. After Grandpa Danny left her and she needed the money to take care of their kids. He’d given her this one when they were courting. Apparently, the pawnshop owner told her he couldn’t get much for it anyway, so she might as well keep it. And she wore it ever since, as her replacement engagement ring.”
“I wonder why she wasn’t wearing it the day she…you know,” Dorian said.
“You can say ‘died,’ Dorian. It is what she did.”
He shrugged. “I’m superstitious. I guess I’m just not comfortable saying the word. It just seems so…I don’t know…final.”
“She went to the hairdresser that day. Which means she also got a manicure. And she always left her rings at home on the days she had her nails done. She was afraid someone would swipe them when she wasn’t looking.”
Izzy chuckled. “‘Swipe’ is a fun word. It’s like from another era.”
“Hers,” I agreed.
“And it’s so expressive.”
I slipped the ring onto my finger and admired it. It was a perfect fit.
“Ever tried it on before?” asked Dorian.
“Nope. It was the one piece of jewelry she wouldn’t let me play with. Nice, huh?” I held out my left hand to the ginger jar. “May I?”
“I think she would want you to wear it. Certainly tonight,” Izzy concluded.
“For luck,” Dorian added.
Everything we’d done so far had taken more out of me than I’d expected. “I can’t go through the rest of this stuff right now,” I said, gesturing to the jewelry box. “I don’t think there’s much in there that isn’t just costume jewelry anyway. If you want one of the pieces, Izzy, you may have it. I think Gram would like that.”
Dorian neatened some of the piles of papers on the dining table while Izzy selected a brooch from the jewelry chest and brought the box back into Gram’s bedroom. “We should give you time to take a nice long bath, followed by a nice long nap,” Dorian said, giving me a hug.
I looked at my best friends. “Would you two please do me a favor? Come backstage right before the show tonight. We’re supposed to start mingling with the audience at half-hour, so get there at seven-fifteen if you can, and tell the house manager that I asked you to stop by the dressing room.”
“Absolutely,” Dorian agreed. “Break a leg!”
“And knock ’em dead,” Izzy added, joining the hug.
“Take that back,” I told her. “I’m getting superstitious, like Dorian. The last person to say that to me was Gram…and it was the last thing she ever said to me.”
Izzy jumped back a step. “Eeek! In that case, merde.”
“Alice Finnegan, you have visitors in the lower lobby.” I heard the stage manager’s voice over the speakers in the dressing room as I was putting the finishing touches on my makeup. I went out to greet Dorian and Izzy.
Dorian handed me a bunch of yellow roses. “These are from both of us.”
“You two are angels.”
“They wouldn’t let us come back to the dressing room because it’s communal,” Izzy told me, “though personally I wouldn’t have minded. I can say that because Dominick is waiting upstairs. Anyone cute back there?”
“Not bad, but everyone seems—the guys anyway—to be either a decade or so younger than I am or considerably older, and I do mean considerably. Actually that’s not true, but the ones in the appropriate age range and sexual orientation for me are already taken. So I won’t be meeting Mr. Right at this wake. Which reminds me. Stay there a minute.”
I went into the dressing room and came back with a little brown shopping bag. “Which one of you wants to hold this on your lap during the show and schlep it around during the meal?”
Dorian looked into the bag. “She does,” he said, pointing to Izzy. “I’m superstitious, remember?” Izzy took the shopping bag from me, peered inside, and saw the ginger jar.
“Gram promised to come to my opening night if I got cast in this show,” I said. “She just needed a little extra help with the transportation.”
Izzy burst into tears, which set me off, too. “Oh, I’m sorry, honey,” she wept. “You’ll have to redo all your makeup, and you’ve only got five more minutes till you said you’re supposed to mingle with the audience.”
“And this is supposed to be a comedy,” I sobbed. I gave them a little shrug and a smile. “Oh, well.”
“Go for it,” Dorian said. “We’ll meet you outside on the street after the performance.”
I went back into the dressing room, did a quick repair to my makeup, and grabbed a teeny slice of the “welcome to the Wake” cake that the producers had gotten for the six new cast members.
My first performance was something of a blur. All I remember is that it went without incident (meaning “disaster”), and that I had a tremendous amount of fun. It was hard work doing a show that was so largely improvisational; you had to constantly be on alert to keep the ball in the air. I had to create decades-long relationships from scratch and out of thin air. I’d never before worked with, nor had ever met until this evening, the man who was playing my grandfather, for example. And yet, over two and a half hours of time together, it was
as though he’d known me since my baptism. Grandma Finnegan’s Wake was very different from any scripted show I had done, in that without a hundred and ten percent team-work from everyone in the cast, the show would collapse like an underdone soufflé. I recalled Dorian’s remark about family. In some ways I felt more bonded to this new, loud, close-knit, ever-squabbling, insane family of fictional Finnegans than I’d ever been with my real-life clan, contents of the ginger jar being the sole exception.
There were hugs and kisses, smiles and tears in the dressing room after the show. I was invited to join the cast at their usual post-performance watering hole, an Irish pub called Mustang Sally’s up near Madison Square Garden. “I’ll try to get there,” I assured them, “but I’ve got some special guests here tonight, and I need to spend some time with them first.”
“So bring them along!” said the actor who was playing my grandfather. I don’t think the noise would have been much to Gram’s taste…although she had a way of surprising me. I graciously declined the invitation.
“So, did you have fun?” I asked my friends.
Dorian nodded and patted his knapsack.
“He’s got breakfast for a week,” Izzy said. “One good thing about being a dog owner in New York is that you’ve always got plastic bags stuffed into your purse. So I sneaked one to Dorian and he loaded up on dinner rolls and pieces of fruit.”
My hand flew to my mouth. “You didn’t!”
“’Fraid so’,” he admitted.
“Well, I think she loved it!” Izzy said brandishing the brown shopping bag.
“She would have been proud of you, Alice,” Dorian said.
“Would you three be pissed off at me if I just went on home?” Dominick asked his wife. “You were wonderful, by the way,” he said to me, giving me a quick peck on the cheek. He said goodbye and headed off, leaving the rest of us standing on the sidewalk in front of the theater.
“My antisocial husband,” Izzy shrugged, watching him walk up the street. “I’ll give him hell about it when I get home. So, are you up for a celebratory drink?”
I nodded. “Let’s head uptown.” We stopped at a Korean deli, where I bought three bottles of Harp beer, since Izzy said she was allowed to have one alcoholic beverage per month and hadn’t yet filled her quota. I shoved them in my shoulder bag and took Gram from Izzy, then led them downstairs to the Sheridan Square subway station, where we waited for the uptown local, taking us to Times Square.
“Where are we going?” Izzy asked, as she and Dorian followed me up to the street.
“To Grandma Finnegan’s wake.”
Dorian looked confused. “Weren’t we just there?”
The lights of Broadway flashed ostentatiously in every shade of neon. Despite the mass gentrification, the area still retained an aura of magic and glamour.
“Follow me,” I told them, and headed for the triangular-shaped block that stands at “the crossroads of the world,” where Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet Forty-second Street. “This is where we start.” In a shadow cast by the great bulk of Number One Times Square, I opened the beers and handed them around. “To Gram,” I said, raising my bottle. My friends joined the toast, each of us taking a huge swig of beer.
“We’ve got to stop meeting at memorials,” Izzy said soberly.
“Do you call that acting?” we chorused, in three dead-on imitations of Nick Katzanides, our big, fat Greek drama teacher.
“And now, a little song,” I announced. “Feel free to join in if you know the words.”
“Can you drink beer right out on the street like this?” Dorian asked.
“Shhhh. Of course not,” Izzy hissed. “Start singing, Alice.”
“Come and meet those dancing feet…on the avenue I’m taking you to…Forty-second Street!” I sang at the top of my lungs. “Oh, shit, I don’t remember any of the rest of the words. Do you?” I looked at Izzy and Dorian, who looked back blankly. “Oh, well.” I repeated the only verse I knew and they joined in. Loudly. Dorian did a little soft shoe routine as he sang. “You’re right,” I teased him, “you’re totally tone-deaf and you have almost no rhythm! But she would have been so proud of you. Look how far you’ve come. My grandmother’s got you singing and dancing on Broadway after all! Oh, wait. Hold this a second.” I tucked my beer under my arm and removed the ginger jar from the shopping bag, handing it to Izzy. Then I opened my purse and pulled out two brand-new boxes of Playtex plastic gloves, the kind my mother used to wear when she washed dishes. “Medium for you,” I said, giving one box to Izzy, and “a large pair for you,” I added, handing the other box to Dorian. “Put them on.”
My friends complied, and I tugged on a pair of lightweight leather gloves that had belonged to Gram. Then I took another swig of beer, returned the bottle to my armpit, and opened the ginger jar.
“You do realize that what we’re about to do here is probably totally illegal,” Izzy said. “They could arrest you for littering or something.”
“So if the cops catch me, I’ll just plead temporary insanity.”
“At least put down the Harp or you’ll end up dropping something and it’ll probably be your grandmother,” Izzy suggested. “I’ll hand it back to you when you want a drink.”
I rested the beer bottle on the sidewalk, took a small handful of Gram’s ashes, and was about to scatter them when Dorian touched my closed hand. “Shouldn’t we say a prayer or something?”
I looked at him thoughtfully. “Like what?”
“The Twenty-third Psalm, maybe? You know, ‘The Lord is my shepherd…’”
“You begin it,” I suggested.
Dorian and Izzy each took a handful of ashes. “‘The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want…’”
“Goodbye, Gram,” I said, tossing my handful into the night sky.
“‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures…’” Izzy murmured, as she and Dorian sprinkled the ashes on the pavement. “‘He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.’ Since your grandmother was a dancer, I figured she’d want to touch the ground,” she said.
I led my friends across the street, where we scattered some more ashes at Forty-second and Broadway, took a few more drinks of beer, then continued our progress uptown. “‘He guideth me in straight paths for His name’s sake,’” I said, quoting the next line of the psalm.
“Remember the day I was over at your apartment and your grandmother collapsed? She said not to forget Shubert Alley,” Dorian said.
I nodded. “That’s where we’re headed.” We turned onto Forty-fourth Street. It was darker than Broadway; the theater marquees were dimmer now that the performances were over for the night.
“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’” Dorian continued, as we each scattered another fistful of ashes by the southern entrance to Shubert Alley, “‘I will fear no evil’—oh, shit, there’s a cop!”
“Where?!” I closed the ginger jar and we tried to hide our beers from the mounted policeman trotting toward us across Forty-fourth Street.
“Go distract him, Dorian,” Izzy encouraged.
“Me? I don’t do so well with cops, remember?”
“‘I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.’” Izzy sighed in exasperation. “Fine, then. Turn around so I can get into your backpack.” She pulled off her rubber gloves and handed them to me, then reached into Dorian’s bag and pulled out an apple, one of his pieces of contraband from the Grandma Finnegan’s free dinner. She tossed it into her purse. “Now go, you two,” she whispered, pointing to the northern end of the alley. The mounted policeman had stopped and was talking to a couple of tourists. He hadn’t yet seen what we were up to, so Izzy pretended she’d been strolling across Shubert Alley and had suddenly noticed him.
“Oh, he’s so beautiful,” she gushed loudly, pointing to the chestnut-colored police horse. “I used to ride. I miss it so much. What’s his name?”
“Luke,” we heard the offi
cer tell her.
“Luke. What a cool name. He looks like a Luke.” Out of the corner of her eye, I saw her toss her head to and fro as though she were flirting with the cop. “Is it okay if I feed him?”
“‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies,’” Dorian recited. He and I were now at the Forty-fifth Street end of Shubert Alley and I made sure that we had a good view of Izzy and the policeman while I peppered the steps of the Booth Theatre with Gram’s ashes. I saw Izzy take the apple from her purse and feed it to the police horse, and as Luke gobbled the last of it, she turned toward us and I gave her a thumbs-up sign. Mercifully, she saw me, thanked the policeman for letting her play with his horse, and watched him clip-clop down the street toward Eighth Avenue before joining us.
I congratulated her on her performance. Then we polished off our beers and tossed the bottles in a nearby trash can.
“Where next?” Izzy asked.
“What about Duffy Square, with the George M. Cohan statue, and the half-price tickets booth?” Dorian suggested.
“Perfect!” I agreed. “Gram actually knew Cohan, you know.”
We walked up to Broadway and Forty-sixth Street. “Thou anoinest my head with oil; my cup runneth over,” Izzy recited as we each anointed the sidewalk from Forty-sixth to Forty-seventh Street with Gram’s ashes. “How much is left?” she asked me.
I peered down into the jar. “Probably just enough for one more location. I think it would be appropriate for Gram to play the Palace one last time.” We crossed the street and stood in front of the legendary Palace Theatre.
“She’s liking this,” Dorian said. “I can feel it.” He reached into the ginger jar for a handful of ashes. Izzy did the same.
I rested the jar on the sidewalk and pulled off the leather gloves, tossing them in my purse. “I’m a little scared to do this…but I want to touch her with my bare hands. Flesh to ashes.” I picked up the jar and took the remaining handful. “‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…’” I turned to face the entrance to the Palace, followed by Izzy and Dorian, who stood on either side of me.
Temporary Insanity Page 28
