Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “I fell off a ladder,” he said.

  “So the doctor said.” Sam brushed the damp, floppy hair off Oliver’s forehead.

  “Did he say I’m in bad shape?”

  “He said you have low blood pressure.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Very low.” Sam pulled a chair up beside the bed. “Trish left a note to say you’re on drugs. That was helpful.”

  “She’s an idiot,” Oliver said.

  “She was in the waiting room. I sent her home,” Sam said. “I know you’re not on drugs.”

  “Are you here alone?” Oliver asked.

  “Charlotte and Julia are coming with food,” Sam said. “Milk shakes, hamburgers, and french fries. We’re staying.”

  “All night?”

  “A sleepover,” Sam said. “The quarters are great.”

  Charlotte and Julia pushed open the door with bags from the deli, handing Oliver the tall milk shake in a plastic cup.

  “Chocolate?” Oliver asked.

  “Of course,” Charlotte said, looking around, rearranging the chairs, putting the lacy shawl she was wearing over the plastic table as a cloth. “I’ve never spent the night in a hospital.” She put her portable radio on the table beside his bed. “Would you like music?”

  “Music would be nice,” Oliver said.

  She turned the radio on low.

  The evening was thick with humidity and was particularly dark for late June. Charlotte opened a window in spite of the nurse’s request to keep it closed, pulled a chair up next to Oliver’s bed, and sat down next to Sam.

  Outside the room, the lights in the hall painted a bright yellow stripe under the door, and the flat, muffled footsteps of the nurses along the corridor of General Surgery gave an eerie sense of prison rather than a hospital.

  The doctor had found nothing besides low blood pressure, except that Oliver’s pupils were dilated and his pulse was a little fast.

  “Nerves,” the doctor said. “That’s my diagnosis.”

  But they admitted him for observation.

  “Three stories is a very long fall,” the doctor said.

  After the lights were out in the room, Oliver sat in the rolled-up bed, wide awake and thinking, his mind clear.

  “Sam?”

  “I’m here.”

  He tried to make out his brother’s face, a gray shape across from him, the night starless, promising rain, the room too dark to distinguish faces from the space around them.

  “What do you remember about the train ride?” Oliver asked.

  “What part?”

  “You’ve always said I was the one who wanted lunch.”

  “Lunch?”

  “On the train to Rome.”

  “No, Oliver,” Sam said, suddenly aware of what Oliver was suggesting. “James and Lucy were going to get lunch anyway. They had planned to. We all wanted to eat.”

  “You told me you weren’t hungry and that I wanted a chocolate milk shake.”

  “We were all hungry except Julia, who had a bottle,” Sam said. “They would have gone even if we hadn’t been hungry.”

  “I thought I was the one responsible,” Oliver said. “That’s what you told me.”

  Sam got up from the chair where he’d been resting and walked over to the window, looking out at the veiled city, the foggy lights shimmering in halos in the sky, the moon a curved line low on the horizon.

  “I must have told it wrong,” Sam said.

  Sam had never considered Oliver susceptible. Of all of them, even Julia, he had thought that Oliver was the least interested in the past, unimplicated in what had happened on the train to Rome, not thoughtlessly, but because he had no memory of it.

  Sam felt a sudden, unfamiliar weight. “Do you remember Gió?” he asked, hoping to provide some measure of kindness to Oliver, to invent a story that might compensate for Sam’s carelessness.

  “You told us about him,” Oliver said.

  “I just wondered how much you remember from seeing and how much from what I’ve told you,” Sam said. “Do you remember that Gió liked you?”

  “He didn’t speak English,” Oliver said.

  “He spoke a little,” Sam said.

  “He told you he liked me?” Oliver asked.

  “I could tell that he did.” Sam leaned over the bed. He wanted to touch him, but he didn’t.

  “I’m very sorry, Oliver,” he said. “I didn’t know you ever worried about what happened, or I’d have been more careful in the way I told you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Oliver tried to close his eyes, but they felt glued open. He wondered whether there were people who couldn’t close their eyes at all, who saw day and night without relief, and whether he was about to become one of them.

  “Aren’t you at all tired, Oliver?” Charlotte asked, when Sam had gone downstairs with Julia to get a Coke. She sat down on his bed.

  “I’m never tired,” Oliver said. “I’m wide awake except for fainting.” His voice was stuck in his throat. “It’s a nightmare.”

  “This isn’t like you at all,” she said. “What do you think is the matter?”

  “I’m going crazy,” Oliver said.

  “You can’t,” Charlotte said. “You’re the normal one, the ordinary American boy. You simply can’t go crazy.”

  “Don’t tell Sam.” Oliver turned over on his side toward Charlotte.

  “Never,” Charlotte said.

  As the night wore on in a hollow and inhospitable room, in the company of his family, Oliver began to sink into a kind of ease he hadn’t felt for weeks, pleased by the sound of their voices washing over him.

  “Why do you think they lived all over the world?” Julia was asking. “Do you think they were running away?”

  “What would they have been running from?” Charlotte asked.

  “They seemed happy,” Sam said. “Incredibly happy. That’s what I remember.”

  “At seven you remember that?” Oliver asked. “How can you know the difference at seven when you haven’t known unhappiness?”

  “I remember exactly. I remember them,” Sam said and, then, considering, added, “I think I remember,” although he knew how slippery memory is, knew that the scenes he believed he remembered of his parents were fixed in place by necessity, that reality and dream are partners in survival.

  He was suddenly uncertain that he wanted the responsibility for his parents’ history, or that he had earned it.

  They lay in the dark, listening to one another’s breathing, to the clatter and muffled thumps outside the door, hoping a nurse would not come in to check Oliver’s blood pressure, interrupting what felt like common breath.

  “I love it that we’re all here lying in the dark telling secrets,” Julia said.

  “Did Sam mention Second City?” Charlotte asked Oliver.

  “It’s going to be perfect for us,” Sam said.

  “Once we decide who you’re going to be, Oliver, and then Sam can write some new scripts deleting the dog,” Charlotte said.

  “I love Anarchy,” Oliver said.

  “I’m voting for a normal American boy,” Sam said.

  “At least that’s a role I’m familiar with,” Oliver said. “A normal American boy, McWilliams style.”

  Oliver felt laughter, out of nowhere, for no reason, like unexpected nausea. His mind, arched like a cat for combat, fast-forwarded to a vision of himself there in the hospital room with his brother and sisters, and he was laughing, laughing, out of control, the laughter changed to tears and he was sobbing, the doctor coming down the corridor, throwing open the door to his room, sending him to the sixth floor, Psychiatric.

  “So good night, guys,” Julia said, turning to face the wall. “And Plum and Jaggers, Good night, good night. Are they here, Sam?”
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  “They’re at home, for a change,” Sam said.

  And he saw them, black-and-white shadows silk-screened on the surface of his memory. They were sitting at either end of the dining-room table, talking across the empty chairs.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE ATLANTIC Theatre Company was on West Twentieth Street, close to the Hudson River, a small Off Broadway space with 165 seats on a residential block. Plum & Jaggers opened there on a Thursday night in September, a steady blast of rain driving at an angle from the river, so the weather tore under umbrellas, turning them inside out.

  “No one’s going to come in this rain,” Julia said, sitting on a splintery stool, her face pressed up against the mirror, putting on pancake and purple-passion lipstick to give her a witchy look under the hot stage lights.

  The date was September 19, 1993, and the McWilliamses had been in New York City for a year, living on West Eleventh Street in a two-bedroom sublet, cheaply had in return for taking care of Meow, the owner’s incontinent cat. All year, they had played Off Off Broadway, in the basements of churches and clubs, at New York University and Hunter College, as entertainment at parties. They’d been written up in small reviews in The Village Voice and New York magazine, and one notice in an article written for The New York Times about downtown underground theater. There was a buzz about them, a kind of kettle boil about the “McWilliams Funnies,” as they were called among the regulars of comedy clubs and Off Off Broadway theaters. They were unusual, doing plays, not stand-up routines, actual stories depending on character rather than one-liners. The fact that they were brothers and sisters gave a particular spirit of intimacy to the dark comedy of their plays, as if the audience had been invited to their home.

  “What do you think about the rain?” Julia asked.

  “They’ll come in spite of it,” Sam said.

  “I wish we’d asked Noli and Grandfather to come later, after the reviews,” Oliver said. He was in sweats, the bottoms low on his hips, the shirt too short, so his belly showed. He had a black baseball cap with a bowling pin medallion on backward and high tops untied.

  In the corner, in a folding chair, Charlotte was reading.

  “I hate it when you read,” Julia said.

  Charlotte looked up from her book. “Who’ll be here tonight, Sam?”

  “Reviewers. Maybe a scout from television. Noli and Grandfather.”

  Sam was also expecting Rebecca Frankel.

  On the front of the program was written: plum & jaggers presents photo album with the McWilliams family. On the inside right page at the top of the credits, he had written a dedication: “For Rebecca Frankel and her daughter, Miriam.”

  “Why?” Julia had asked. “We don’t even know them, isn’t that right?”

  “She’s the one who wrote to Sam about laughter when he was young,” Charlotte said.

  “I know about her,” Julia said. “I just don’t know her.”

  “We’ve never met,” Sam said.

  He assumed he was in love with her.

  He had written her letters, which he never sent, during the winter he spent in the Cage. He had large manila envelopes full of all his plays and letters and pictures of the family, thinking that if he ever found her address, he’d send them to her. She was always on his mind, but he hadn’t looked for her until the summer at Second City in Chicago. After the incident with Oliver in the hospital, he finally tracked her down. She was living with her daughter, Miriam, who must have been about thirteen, on West Seventy-first Street in New York City and was working as an editor at the Larkin Press.

  Dear Rebecca Frankel [he had written when he located her address],

  Perhaps you don’t remember, but many years ago, when your son and husband were killed in West Jerusalem, I wrote to you to express my deep sympathy and to tell you about my parents. You wrote back a letter I have read again and again, which has been helpful to me. It is about laughter and despair.

  I am the writer in a comedy troupe with my brother and sisters called Plum & Jaggers. Should we ever come to New York City to perform, I will let you know.

  Your friend, Sam McWilliams

  Rebecca Frankel wrote a postcard with a picture by Picasso of a plump young woman with half a face in which she said how glad she was to hear from him, and of course she’d come to his performance in New York City.

  From then on they communicated with some regularity by postcard, the small white space sufficient to carry the weight of their emotion without embarrassment.

  If Rebecca had been, say, twenty-eight when Sam wrote her in the first place, when he was ten, he thought—twenty-eight at least, with a seven-year-old son, no doubt a college education, then she must be forty now. Not too old, he thought, and leaning against the wall in the dressing room of the Atlantic Theatre, waiting for the call to go on, Sam had the terrible excitement of a performer who knows his audience will include the woman he loves.

  In the second row center, Noli was having trouble breathing. It was her first trip to New York; they had come by Metroliner from Union Station in Washington. In the last two years, since the children were away, she had been going out, but never unaccompanied or very far beyond Washington. The agoraphobia was always present. Whenever she had a sense of sinking into a kind of panic hole, she would imagine herself scrambling out of it, making her way upward to the open air.

  Now she concentrated on the theater program, reading the notes on her grandchildren, though she knew them by heart.

  “You know, William,” she said, leaning against him, “every time I read the program notes about the setting for the show with the stupid bomb under the dining-room table, I feel ill.”

  “I think that’s the point,” William said.

  The houselights were dimming when a dark-haired woman in a hooded black raincoat rushed into a seat in the front row at the end of the aisle, just to the left of Noli and William, and sat down with a girl about fifteen, her daughter perhaps, a seemingly reluctant traveler.

  She turned around, a pretty woman, Noli noted, with sparkling eyes and dimples.

  “Do we know her?” William asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Noli said. “I would remember.”

  She looked back at them again.

  “Do you happen to have an extra program?” she asked. “I stupidly forgot to pick one up.”

  The girl was at an age when public conversation with her mother embarrassed her. She sank lower in her seat.

  “I do,” Noli said, reaching in her large bag, where she had stashed some programs, twenty at least, to send to friends, handing one to the woman.

  “Thank you,” the woman said, struggling out of her raincoat. “I’m so glad to have this. I know the writer of the show, so I couldn’t miss it,” she said, as if she were responding to a question she had been asked.

  By midnight, the rain had stopped in New York City, the cast party with champagne and flowers and congratulations was over, and the McWilliams family walked, arm in arm, down Sixth Avenue.

  “It was perfect,” Noli said.

  “Not exactly perfect,” Sam said. “But better than I’d hoped.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful us,” Julia sang, her arm flung over Charlotte’s shoulders.

  “People laughed,” Oliver said. “They really laughed.”

  “I believe that the woman in the seat in front of us was weeping,” Noli said. She laced her arm through Sam’s. “She knew you.”

  “She knew me?” Sam asked.

  “A very pretty lady with curly hair and dimples crying her eyes out,” Noli said. “I tried to catch her to invite her to the cast party, but she’d disappeared.”

  There were no stars, but the lights of the city shimmering in the low fog were like a blanket of stars spread over them, as Sam walked with his family, his company, through the muddy puddles of rainwater to their b
orrowed home on West Eleventh Street.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER NINE

  IN THE early winter of 1998, Currents, a weekly news and feature magazine, devoted a series of issues to what the editors called “The State of Internal Affairs in North America.” The first of the series was titled “The Book of Revelations—2000” and included pieces on the apocalyptic nature of the turn of the second millennium, how a kind of craziness was taking over, a proliferation of cults and extreme behavior, of fear and paranoia, even terror—the biblical promise of Revelations.

  Another issue was on terrorism. “Terrorism: Warfare as Cult of Self.” There had been the trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing of the World Trade Center, suspicion of foul play in TWA Flight 800, the trial and the plea bargain of Ted Kaczinski, the Unabomber, singly responsible for three deaths and twenty-three injuries. There were random incidents of terrorist-planted bombs in the United States, one in January at an abortion clinic in Atlanta, a detonated bomb found in a trash can outside Macy’s Department Store in New York City, an explosion at a mini-mart in New Orleans injuring an employee as he unpacked canned peaches. It was a time, not unlike 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King, when an ordinary citizen had a sense that anything could happen.

  The last issue of the series in Currents was on comedy. Plum & Jaggers was the subject of the cover story.

  Sam McWilliams was now thirty-one. In the cover photograph he was standing—a tall, thin, serious-looking young man with wire-rimmed glasses, khakis, a button-down blue shirt with the neck open and the sleeves rolled up, looking by his dress and demeanor like a recent Ph.D. in English literature, except for a dark, untamed intensity evident even in a glossy photograph. Charlotte stood next to him, wearing a long black skirt and a striped man’s shirt, oversized, with the tails out. At twenty-nine she looked twelve, a little plump, with round tortoise-shell glasses and long dark hair pulled behind her ears, an expression of childlike surprise. Julia, her thick curly hair almost wild around a perfectly shaped face, had glasses, too, small rectangular ones at the end of her nose, her blue eyes staring unsmiling at the viewer. She wore a short black skirt, a small tight black turtleneck sweater, and she was thin enough to appear anorexic. She was sitting on the floor. Oliver, crouching beside her in tight jeans and a heavy cable-knit turtleneck, his black-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses folded on his knee, had changed the most since the early nineties, angular, with thinning sandy hair, wispy, long over his forehead, a kind of haunted look on a face that had once been sunny and round. He was almost twenty-eight, Julia twenty-five, though she looked older.